So, I've still been keeping up with my progress on the City '26 challenge, and I'll have a lot more to say about it in a couple of weeks when it's time for the first of the quarterly updates I promised about my 2026 resolutions. But in the meantime I wanted to discuss one question that's arisen in my mind as I've been working on the challenge. A question... of elves.

I'd said before that one of my reasons for choosing the city of Lüm was because I wanted to further flesh out the world of Curcalen, and that this could give me an impetus for doing so. And I think it has. There are still many questions to be resolved, but at least it's made me aware of them, even if I haven't resolved them yet. I don't know what form of currency is used in Djarvin (or anywhere else on Curcalen), or what language is spoken there (or anywhere else on Curcalen), or what calendar is used there (or anywhere else on Curcalen), and yeah, those are things I really ought to figure out. I established from the beginning that summoning extraplanar creatures plays a major rôle in Curcalen's industry and economy, but I really need to put some more effort into developing exactly what creatures are summoned for what purposes and working out the details of Curcalen's summoning-based "technology".

But even if there's still plenty that needs to be done, there are many things I have worked out about Curcalen in the process of writing my City '26 entries. I have worked out at least some aspects of Curcalen's technology; among other things I know that it has subways; that a primary form of transport is carriages on Curcalen conveyed by summoned creatures (though with Curcalen's summoning theme I guess that may have been sort of a gimme); that it has an analogue to movies called mins^[1]; that there are analogues to airports that serve as departure and arrival points for flying summoned creatures on which Curcalish people can ride long distances^[2] I've expanded a bit on the workings and effects of élan vital, including coming up with a new form of élan vital, élan féerique (more on which in a bit). I've come up with a few minor covins (in addition to the eight major covins that I came up with along with the world), and have named a number of new countries (the locations of which I ought to figure out on the map.) I've come up with some relevant vocabulary, particularly "laither" for someone who provides summoning services for a fe, and "lathery" for an establishment providing that service. (I'd previously used "laither" for a specific type of ellogous worm found on Curcalen, but decided the word was more needed for this new meaning; said worm has been renamed to a "bannath".) And I've come up with a number of new folks found on Curcalen—the alicund, the crast, the dile, the gjana, the takin, and the tsastra. Oh, right, and the ouphe, which is kind of the topic that this post is primarily about.

See, another detail I've figured out about Curcalen, or more generally about the esture of Usm in general, is how the fey work there. When a creature dies, some of its élan âmal transmutes into a form of élan autre called élan féerique (mentioned above), and when enough élan féerique accumulates—which most frequently happens in places teeming with life like forests—it congeals into a new creature, a fey. The form the fey takes is to some degree patterned on what creatures are nearby; if a fey forms in the wilderness far from any settlements, it may take a shape similar to that of a beast, plant, or natural phenomenon, but a fey that forms near a city may take human form. (One of the NPCs created for the City '26 challenge, the Harthorn, is just such a fey.) I considered I think shortly after coming up with this idea (well, most of the idea; the name for élan féerique came much later) whether maybe fey could become sufficiently similar to humans to interbreed with them, and/or élan féerique could infect a human, either way making some kind of part-fey folk. I ultimately decided on something more general, a human somehow infused or tinged with any form of otherplanar élan autre, which I called a dile. Maybe there were humans affected by élan féerique, but if so they were just a special type of dile.

...Or would they? When last week I was developing Graypool, a neighborhood of Lüm that was especially impacted by and connected with the fey, I revisied this idea. Perhaps after all élan féerique is sufficiently different from élan lutin and élan génial to warrant a separate part-fey folk after all. (Hmm... for that matter ,come to think of it, are élan lutin and élan génial sufficiently different from each other to give rise to separate folks? I'll give more thought to that later.) But what to call it?

So. A humanoid creature, very close to human, but with some fey influence. That's... okay, a good case could be made that that's an elf. Maybe I should just call them elves. Or at least half-elves. And I did consider that, but... I really didn't want to do that. For the worlds of the Wongery, I've been avoiding the all-too-ubiquitous fantasy conventions rooted in J. R. R. Tolkien and Wikipedia:Dungeons & Dragons—and elves, along with dwarves and dragons and quasimedieval kingdoms, are a big part of those. It kind of felt like I'd be treading too close to the conventions I was trying to avoid.

In fact, one of the purposes of the Wongery—not necessarily the main purpose, and I guess not one of the purposes I listed when I wrote a blog post about the purposes of the Wongery, but one of its purposes nonetheless—is to encourage writers and worldbuilders of fantasy settings to move outside the box and make more settings that aren't just Tolkien/D&D clones. I like Dungeons & Dragons^[3]; I like Tolkien^[4]; I don't like that such a high proportion of modern fantasy settings are just carbon copies of theirs. I've been piddling around for years—I think almost since the Wongery's creation—at a "Fantasy Manifesto" I intend to publish as a blog post when and if I finally finish it that goes into much more depth about this, but the gist of it is... let's have more variety in fantasy settings, and stop just churning out endless slight variations on the same damn thing. I've been trying to come up with a term for the specific omnipresent fantasy subgenre that patterns itself so closely on the foundations of Tolkien and D&D, with requisite elves, dwarves, kings, dragons, orcs, and so on, since as far as I'm aware no such term currently exists, but I haven't settled on one I really like yet. I guess for this blog post I'll call it "staple fantasy", but I'm not totally sold on that term and may call it something different if I have cause to refer to it again in the future. But anyway, I'm not saying that elves and dwarves and dragons are bad and that there's never a place for it; I'm just saying they don't have to be crammed haphazardly into ninety percent of fantasy settings, nor do a like percentage of fantasy settings have to resemble a pastiche of medieval Europe. The fantasy genre offers so much greater a breadth of possibilities; let's do more to explore them!

And yet I have used the names of creatures of myth and folklore in other worlds. As I've mentioned before, I've used such names for types of dreambuilt in Dadauar, so there are dreambuilt ogres and zombies and more recently undines. For that matter, one type of deepling, the nicker, is also named after a creature from folklore, albeit a slightly more obscure one. My rationale was that, well, it wasn't that I had specially looked to find a place for these creatures in the world; it was that I had creatures in the world that happened to be relatively close to those mythical creatures anyway, so why not use the names? For that matter, I even had plans to use elves in the Wongery in a different context—a few articles about Gallerra mention a superhero^[5] named Saint Nicholas. I haven't written an artile about Saint Nicholas yet, but I have decided on some things about him that will be mentioned when I do get around to giving him his own article, and one of those things is that he has a cohort of elves working with him. Why am I okay with elves in Gallerra and not in Curcalen?

Well... I don't think those questions are unanswerable. I think the reason I'm okay with ogres and undines in Dadauar and not elves in Curcalen is that elves are much more intrinsic to this type of staple fantasy, and more heavily standardized. Almost every fantasy RPG seems to feel obligated to include elves (they're less pervasive in fantasy literature), and they're almost always basically identical, the same pointy-eared, slightly magical, very long-lived humanoid folk with an affinity for forests. (Not that there aren't settings that do something different with elves and take them farther from the Tolkien template, but they're in the minority.) That's much less true of ogres and undines and nickers; they're less everpresent than elves, dwarves, and dragons (though I suppose ogres aren't too far behind), and when they do appear there's much more diversity in how they're presented. But elves, like dwarves and dragons, are just too redolent of the staple fantasy I want to get away from.

AS for Saint Nicholas's elves... I think the reason I find those less objectionable is that Gallerra isn't a fantasy world, and they're not fantasy elves; they're more patterned after Santa Claus's elves. And even so, they really don't resemble Santa's elves in much aside from the name; they're called elves because of their association with Saint Nicholas, but they bear much less resemblance to diminutive humanoid toymakers than they do to weird eldritch monstrosities. But anyway, I think they're more clearly removed from and distinct from the elves of staple fantasy, and so I have less of a problem with using the word there.

I did end up going with a creature name from folklore for the part-fey of Curcalen (and I suppose more broadly of Zien); I decided, at least tentatively, to call them ouphes. And I think when I get around to writing an article about them that I may bend so far as to say that some people call them elves... or call fey elves and call ouphes half-elves. But it didn't feel right to me to use "elves" as the primary name.

I guess there's one other thing I should address here. If I'm trying to avoid overuse of terms used in staple fantasy, or even from folklore, why am I using "fey"? How does that fit into my desire for more originality? Well... the thing is, there are certain words that I see as not referring to specific creatures, but to general types of creatures that could exist in multiple estures. "Demon", for example, has had enough different referents that it strikes me as having become more or less a general term for strains of evil otherplanar beings (or otherplanar beings associated, rightly or wrongly, with evil). There are demons in Usm and demons in Ses and demons in Dverelei and demons in Mogn and aside from all being (mostly/allegedly) evil otherplanar beings they have nothing to do with each other. Ghosts are the immaterial undead remnants of dead creatures, a general enough concept that they can exist in many estures, and again the ghosts of one esture may work very differently from those of another. And I feel similarly about "fey". I'm okay with using "fey" because I see it, like "demon" and "ghost", not as describing a specific creature but as describing a specific type or archetype of creature that can exist independently in many different estures. Does this make sense? Am I being consistent? I don't know, but those are my feelings on it, anyway.

BUt like I said, ouphes aren't the only new folk I've created for Curcalen in the course of the City '26 challenge. I've come up with a good half dozen others too. And what all but one of them have in common is that, well, like the elf and dwarf of staple fantasy, and unlike the nonhuman folks of Curcalen I'd mentioned in the article on Djarvin before I started the City '26 challenge (the bannath, the fank, and the urippu), they're pretty close to human. But they have reason to be; they're either modified humans, or creatures that—like the ouphe—have a rationale for being patterned after humans. Still... I kind of wonder if I'm overdoing it. Do I need so many folks, and in particular do I need so many near-human folks? I think my reasons for making all these folks were twofold. First, I've seen how many people enjoy playing the slightly more obscure playable species in Dungeons & Dragons—those not found in the core rulebooks—and I figured maybe I ought to have more folks in my worlds to cater to people like them. But should I be catering to them? Are they really a significant part of my intended audience? As for the predominane of near-humans, I guess the reason for that was just because I figured that, well, to humans, a near-human would be more relatable than something more alien. But should it be, and even if it is should I be complacent with that, or should I perhaps try more to encourage sympathy with more unusual creatures? I don't know; those aren't fully rhetorical questions, and I don't have definitive answers for them. I've considered whether I should make an effort to add a lot more folks to other worlds like Dadauar as I now have for Curcalen, but... again, I'm not totally convinced that that's a good idea or that I'm doing the right thing. At the very least, however, I think maybe I've swung the pendulum too far toward near-human folks on Curcalen, and I ought to come up with a few more clearly nonhuman folks to balance things out a bit.

This line of thought has, however, led me to realize another reason I'm not a big fan of the elves and dwarves of staple fantasy, aside from their overrepresentation. I've thought in the past that part of the problem with them was their superfluity, that they're so close to human in most settings that they don't really have a reason to exist as separate folks; their differences from humanity are almost entirely cultural, and they could be replaced with humans with their cultural traits and almost nothing would change. (The only significant noncultural difference between elves and dwarves and humans in a lot of fantasy settings is that the elves and dwarves have a much longer lifespan, but even that... seldom seems to matter nearly as much as it should.) And yes, I still think that's true, but I think another thing about them that bothers me that I've never consciously recognized before is that there's no reason they should be so close to humans in shape and appearance. Many settings give elves and dwarves distinct origins, like elves originating in the fey realm and dwarves being born of the earth, or something similar, which is fine, but then why do they look like humans? (Slight differences in proportions and ear shapes aside.) Why, in so many fantasy settings, does "human" seem to be the default shape? I'm not saying it's not possible to come up with reasons for that to be the case—like I said, I do have reasons for ouphes and alicunds and crasts and some of my other new folks of Curcalen to be near-humans—just that most settings don't make the effort.

And yes, I realize that this may seem like a silly thing to complain about in a fantasy setting. In a science fiction setting, you can complain about near-human aliens because evolution does not work that way; evolution is highly contingent and chaotic and the reason that humans have the shape we do is due to a long series of circumstances and happenstances, and the chances of some completely unrelated species on a distant planet evolving into something with such a close resemblance to humanity are basically negligible. (Yes, convergent evolution is a thing, but it's not... that.)

Fantasy, of course, doesn't have to follow real-world science... but that's not to say it's anything goes, at least not without some justification. I have often seen it said that magic by its very nature should remain mysterious and unexplained, that if you try to place rules or systems on magic it's no longer magic. This is another topic on which I intend to write (and long ago started writing) a separate blog post, so I won't go into my full reasoning and arguments here, but suffice for now to say that I could hardly disagree more with this sentiment. Done well, giving magic rules and systems makes it more wondrous and magical, not less, and if you don't have some sort of rules in place it's just random nonsense or a cheap plot device. Obviously not everything needs to be explained, and it's perfectly okay and can even be beneficial to leave some mysteries, but even in a fantasy setting things should generally... fit together and make sense. And, as much as in a science fiction setting, having near-human folks that aren't actually related to humans is something that, to me, kind of demands an explanation... and in a lot of fantasy settings it doesn't really get one. Why should there be so many creatures that look so close to human; what about the human shape makes it so prevalent? It's not hard to come up with explanations; there are many possibilities; but absent any hint of an explanation or even acknowledgment that an explanation is needed, having all these near-human folks just... kind of bothers me. Not enough to make me hate the setting, but enough to make me maybe like it a little less. So that's another strike against the elves and dwarves of staple fantasy.

Anyway, I feel like maybe I'm starting to stray from what was supposed to be the main point of this blog post, which means it may be time to wrap it up, or maybe that it was time to wrap it up several paragraphs ago. My first quarterly update for 2026 is due in a little over a week, but there are several other matters I also want to write about, so I'll try to get another post or two up before then (after not having made any posts in almost two months... sorry). So... see you then! Or... you'll see me then. Or you'll see the words that I write then. Anyway, bye.