Population and location

[Elterio Delgard]

Heya!

Part of my big project to draw a whole planet, I was wondering where normally people tend to place orcs, elves, goblins, kobolds, mages.
In my world there are different tribes of goblins, but one of them actually lives in a pine forest way up north.
Orcs, some of them live in the savanah, others in a fungus biome, and more have decided to form an empire with some humans in some vast plains.
Elves, for now, are in the forests and redwoods.
Kobolds I have no Idea...

Another tricky question is skin colour... Must I absolutely correlate the colour of skin with the lattitudes and climates? If there is a massive migration of black people up north, would a few thousand years affect their pigmentation and vice versa if a white population goes to warm and sunny places?

Also... I am quite curious about something else... Does skin colour simply imply a genetic diversity with other races such as elves, or not? I mean, a black elf from what I know is different not just because of the skin but from its attributes... Dwarves I guess wouldn't bother with skin colour... Orcs, normally it goes from grey to green?

[Azélor]

I think there is a lot of cliché and most of it is up to the author. Nothing prevents elves from living in cities and cultivating land as long as there is a sound explanation.
Most humanoid species can live in different kinds of environments, just like humans.

Some fantasy tropes are unrealistic such as advanced civilization living underground (goblins, drarves, drows, others). Living as troglodyte is possible but without proper air circulation, they will suffocate if they are too far from a fresh air source.

[Diamond]

The biggest unrealistic fantasy trope, to be honest, is that multiple intelligent races could simultaneously naturally develop on the same planet and then co-exist for thousands of years without one becoming dominant to the point where it wipes the others out.

I think fantasy readers are pretty forgiving though, as long as your explanations make good (in-world) sense.

[Elterio Delgard]

mmmm... Interesting point Diamond... Actually thats something I can work on, dominance. On my first continent there are ors, goblins and humans. In the northern part, because of the Kastosian Empire, mankind is on top, even though the goblins manage to be the best merchant, they are nowhere capable of winning a war against a kingdom of man without being punished out of proportions by the power house.

[rdanhenry]

Actually, multiple human species have coexisted for thousands of years at a time in various locations throughout our evolution. Our current aloneness is more exception than rule. In Europe, modern humans and neanderthals coexisted for some five thousand years. They are currently believed to have interbred. And direct aggression or competition from biologically modern humans is no longer a leading candidate for the cause of neanderthal extinction.

And segregation by environment is actually a reasonable response to the competition argument in any case. Different fantasy races are better suited to living in different environments. Elves dominate forests because they are better adapted to a forest environment. Lizardmen dominate swamps by being best in wetlands. Humans are generally treated as generalists, but we are savanna/grasslands creatures at heart. However, many RPG settings and a few written settings (and Oz did it well before D&D, so this one can't really be pinned on gamers) go overboard on the intelligent races. You aren't going to see dozens of humanoid types through evolution through natural selection. However, magical "uplift", divine intervention, or gathering from multiple origins through dimensional portals all allow for such extensive variety if one wants it.

[zhar2]

I use density maps, first i create a black and white density map for a region, focusing high-density area around waterways, resources and agricultural areas. Use a topography mask to account for altitude. then decide what each grey value means, #xxxxx grey = 1 village per every x square pixels and so on.

[waldronate]

For many people, the idea of killing other humans is A Bad Thing. Killing things that look like humans but provably aren't is quite acceptable, and possible even desirable. It's why all manner of atrocities happen out here in the real world: the enemy is the other and the other isn't even human.

In most fantasy settings, we like to push those enemies out even farther by making them visibly non-human. Then we go even farther by assigning them various different kinds of origins to make them even more different (gods think themselves into being or spring whole from other gods, gods create races from various lumps of basic materials and then infuse life via various techniques, and races enslave and change other races). Yet all of these races can somehow interbreed to produce offspring...

Skin color in humans doesn't precisely correlate with latitude: it's more to do with UV index. A few thousand years should be enough to start seeing regional variations, but how intense those variations would be would be purely dependent on how intense the selection pressure (physical and cultural) is.

[Diamond]

Actually, multiple human species have coexisted for thousands of years at a time in various locations throughout our evolution.

The key word being 'human'.

An orc isn't human. An aarakockra definitely isn't. Elves are fey creatures who steal our young, or live thousands of years and can't be trusted because they know so much more than we do, or because they live so long have found ways to lord it over us. Dwarves? Gnomes? Earthier (pun intended) versions of same. Other races make even less sense. Dragonborn? Really? Tieflings? Come on. We'd either slaughter them outright, confine them to reservations, or be killed ourselves if they could outbreed us.

Now I know one of fantasy's hugest tropes is multiple races all evolving/co-existing on the same world, and I'm not gonna change that. But let's be honest with ourselves - if that situation really existed, even if only ONE other race besides us shared the planet, we'd annihilate each other. Hell, look at what we've done to OURSELVES over the millennia. We can't be trusted to play well with others.

[waldronate]

Xenophobia: It's not just a good idea, it's the LAW!

[Tonnichiwa]

Well, from the 1st edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Monster Manual it says Kobolds are usually found in dank, dark places such as dismal overgrown forests or subterranean settings. Something else you might want to keep in mind with them is that they hate most other life and delight in killing and torture. They particularly hate such creatures as brownies, pixies, sprites, and gnomes. They war continually with the latter and will attack them on sight.

If you are using 5th edition rules, they have turned Kobolds into basically the lackeys of Dragons. So they tend to hang out wherever evil dragons make their lair.

Hopefully that gives you some idea of what to do with your worlds Kobolds.