This is something that I left out of my CULTURE post. I want to touch on the different ‘races’ I have in my series. I use that term because it is the popular word in the fantasy genre. While pretty much all of the people in FOTS are human, they are racially different. Each race has a different average physical build, different hair colour, different eye colour, different skills, etc. Two of my nations are of the same race, but long ago went separate ways. While reading you will find they have become different over such a long time apart, but will realize they are still very much alike, as some traits trace back to the same source, and are simply manifestations of the same thing. The other mainland races, of which there are four others, all differ from these two nations and each other. As an analogy think of ancient Greece, where all city-states were their own people in a lot of ways, but all were, more or less, Greek. FOTS is like that except imagine if all were not necessarily Greek, if instead some of the other great civilizations at the time were moved to that area of the map.
Another of the mainland races, however, is unlike the ones I’ve mentioned so far. Their ways are different altogether. They are ambitious and vengeful. Characters of this race of humans are morally controversial in a lot of ways when one compares them to typical, ‘good’ people. They share some of the ambition and innovation of the ancient Macedonians, and have an even stricter military culture than ancient Sparta.
A third race, the newcomers to the main continent and a focus for ‘half’ of the storyline, will drive the plot. They are human but can not be comprehended using typical human standards. They are more talented, on average, at almost everything than those from the mainland (there are obviously exceptions), and appear to everyone else as being ‘strange’. They are viewed by most of the mainlanders as being extremely intimidating and, especially in the early goings, as a ‘plague’ to the peaceful world. They are a race that has been in a rival’s war for a very very long time, and so are far more skilled in combat, yet they are significantly fewer in population (thank the Gods!). I believe this race will be interesting to readers because they are so different from what people may have come across before in the genre. Sometimes they will be frighteningly intimidating, and other times ‘bad-ass’. I have a feeling they are destined to become the ‘fan favourites’. I’ll leave it at that, for now.
© 2013 FOTS Fantasy
FOTS Fantasy 