Humans are the most interesting aliens in your game: How to make the fantastical fantastical again in genres of over saturation

It’s a sad fact of narrative design that WHEN EVERYTHING IS CRAZY, NOTHING IS CRAZY.

This is especially true in the realm of fantasy races.

You can see this at work in things like modern incarnations of D&D:

In a world where you can buy miracles at 7/11 and your mailman is a half-angel half-jellyfish with mild vampirism, how does anything feel unusual anymore?

So, how do you make the fantastical fantastical again?

Well, stop using fantastical stuff where humans would do.

If your fantasy/alien race is just humans with pointy ears or rubber foreheads, why not just make them human?

Interesting things will happen, I promise.

(And if your fantasy race is a non-Euclidean hive-mind made of moon gas, try making them human anyways, just to see what happens.)

What happens when you make fantasy races human…

First, the fantastical elements that you retain will get, well, fantastical again.

Second, when placed into the ecological niche of a fantasy race, humans will frequently become more interesting and unique than the fantasy race that they replaced.

Monsters are monsters again

When I was brought onto the first game that I wrote for professionally (perennial example Defender’s Quest), I was informed that the game had to be fantasy. (Despite my attempts to persuade the devs to do all kinds of weirder and less marketable stuff.) The gameplay was already weird and unexpected, the devs reasoned, so the setting needed to be something players were semi-familiar with lest we bombard people with too much weird all at once.

I decided quickly that this fantasy setting was going to be a medieval human world, rather than generic elf-y, dwarf-y dollar store D&D. In fact, it was a human world without magic.

Then, we added dragons and a necromancer.*

*And a librarian who could shoot lightning out of her fingertips. …And a horde of man-eating sheep led by a platinum giga-sheep. It was a whole thing.

ANYWAYS!

Players went nuts for the dragon.

It appeared as a recruitable character at the halfway point in the game, and (despite appearing trailers) caught so many people off guard that reviewers refused to mention it in reviews lest they spoil what they considered the best surprise in the game:

This fantasy game… has a dragon in it.

I was genuinely caught off guard by the whole thing. It had never occurred to me as I was writing it, but our gritty, low magic, human world had reacclimated players’ expectations.

A fantastical beast was, well, fantastical.

(The necromancy formed the entire mystery plot of the game, rather than being a disagreement with the local Magical HOA. When things aren't mundane, they can be, you know, mysterious.)

When humans are better aliens than aliens

When placed into the ecological niche of a fantasy race, 9 times out of 10, humans will naturally and automatically become more interesting and unique than the fantasy race that they replaced.

Humans are really good at this, and they get really unique as they do it.

As the Hunter Gather’s Guide to the 21st Century likes to say: Niche switching is our niche.

Just look at some niche-adapted folks from around the world. This is what we do on one planet, under relatively normal circumstances. What if you place us under, you know, fantastical circumstances?

Look at fantasy-staple Dwarves. What do they do? Live underground and mine. What if we made them people?

Suddenly our run of the mill beard-having, ale-chuggin, hard-work-is-its-own-reward-ing, Scottish-accented cliches are free to be... Well, what would people look like if they lived entirely underground and survived by mining?

I did this back when I was doing narrative design for Defender’s Quest II, and we ended up with a faction 7 foot tall matriarchal polygamous albinos. (Which I later cut from the game because world-building as marketing is a recipe for wasted work and dissatisfied customers, but that’s a story for another time.)

Frank Herbert’s Dune is almost entirely built on this:

– Super computers: People.
– Proud warrior race: People.
– Galaxy devouring raving lunatic swarm: People.
– Sexy psionic matriarchal elder race: People.
– Inhuman god-emperor worm dude: People.
– Etc...

What would science fiction look like today if Dune had been about AIs, K-mart Klingons, space goblins, sexy blue alien babes, and monster-brain overlord #57?

…Would we remember sand worms if they had been swamped in other aliens?

So, next time you feel the urge to bust out the pointy ears and rubber foreheads, ask yourself:

Is this more interesting than a human being in full niche-adaptation-mode?

You might be surprised by the answer... and how much more impactful the fantasy elements that you keep become.