I’ve had multiple secondary worlds tumbling around inside my head. One of them is Aftania,* a world that is unashamedly inspired by things like Dungeons & Dragons and Warcraft. It features all manner of monstrous creature as well as the expected “races” like elf, human, orc, and gnome.
Absent from this world are Dwarves and Halflings. Anyone that knows me would think the absence of Dwarves was weird, fantasy dwarves are one of my favourite races (coming in close behind orcs). But I decided to condense them all into gnomes. So, gnomes, in the world of Aftania, can be small three-foot humanoids, slightly larger (halfling-size), or burly and wide shouldered with bushy beards like Dwarves. This makes gnomes more similar to humans in that they can be a whole variety of sizes and shapes as oppose to all being made out of the same mold.
It also gives me more freedom to make certain body types and features more common among certain gnomish cultures. Maybe the mountain gnomes to the north are the burly ones, while the gnomes with deep ancestral roots in urban areas are smaller. It allows for a lot more variance.
It bugs me when all of a race are the same. It doesn’t make sense that elves high in the mountains have the exact same culture as the completely disconnected elves on the other side of the continent. Same goes for physique, though I’m not sure if this is a remnant from Tolkien or the influence of video games/pen and paper RPGs.
I’m trying to keep all the things I love about this kind of high fantasy but with a few twists that make it uniquely mine.
*Aftania is actually the name of the largest territory, and is also where the majority of my current stories/characters reside. The planet is referred to as Mo’den (an orcish word), but particularly arrogant Aftanians insist on calling the planet “Aftania.”