Fantasy Creatures
How I have made one of my creatures for Thear
I enjoy making new fantasy creatures occasionally. I tend to make them for my main story world, the world of Thear.
Thear has many traditional fantasy species including the people of Elves, and Mermaids, as well as fantasy animals such as dragons and unicorns. I like to add some creatures of my own making to the mix of the world. I feel it helps it to feel more full when it had more species variety, the fantasy ecosystem feeling more believable.
One of the creatures I have made for the world of Thear is the snow-jumper. The snow-jumper is a fluffy creature about the size of a ferret, it has a spring-like tail that makes up the back half of its body, like a snake, and has two front legs. It primarily lives in cold mountainous regions, and often has white and grey coats to blend into the rocks and snow. They burrow under the snow or crawl along the rocks and then jump up to fall down on top of their prey. Its diet consists mostly of bugs and small animals.
Snow-jumpers tend to develop symbiotic relationship with dragons, dragons tend to have pest problems in their dens and bugs on their scales, snow-jumpers eat these creatures thus removing these annoyances for their dragon host. Snow-jumpers also sometimes provide heat to dragons during the coldest times of year since they emit decent amounts of heat for their relatively small size. In return the dragons offer the snow-jumpers protection and share their den with them. Since dragons can magically change their size, their preferred size tends to correlate to how many snow-jumpers live in their den with them. If the dragon prefers to be quite small they may only share their den with one snow-jumper, but if they prefer to be large in size they may have as many as 30 snow-jumpers living in their den.
When I was creating the snow-jumpers I started with their relationship to the other creatures and the role they would fill in the ecosystem. I wanted the dragons to have a creature they form symbiotic relationships with, since so many such relationships exist in the animal kingdom in real life. Since the dragons live in the mountainous regions the creature needed to live there too. From there I then decided I wanted the creature to burrow in the snow and jump out and to have a warm fluffy coat to deal with the cold climate. I also wated it to look cute.
From those points I then designed the snow-jumper by combining a few attributes from different animals to make something that would feel fantasy enough and also fit the role I wanted it to fill in the world.
Thank you for reading!
Have you ever made a fantasy creature?