this post was submitted on 07 Jun 2026
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Worldbuilding

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Cats, Wolves, Foxes, as well as generic reptiles and birds seem to be pretty well represented. You've also got hyenas in the form of gnolls, as well as frogs. I don't see a lot of insects borrowed wholesale, but plenty of pixie-esque creatures borrow some anatomy here and there like wings and antennae.

One thing I see very little of are domestic dogs. The above mentioned wolves and foxes seem to fill that niche. Shame IMO, as the staggering variety in appearance and behavior of dogs (I believe they're the most phenotypically diverse species known) is excellent fodder for different cultures. Ironically, I myself ended up homogenizing my own diverse canine kobolds into the more vulpine (and less anthropomorphic) yinrih.

Admittedly I didn't have much developed on them, but there were two subraces of kobolds based on corgis that filled the dwarf role (short, hardy, stubborn, and practical) but they were pastoralists as you'd expect of a herding breed.

Primates, even other hominins, would make a great foundation for fantasy races. My previous conworld, whence came the above kobolds, did this, with human subraces based on neanderthals.

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[–] cerebralhawks@lemmy.dbzer0.com 5 points 2 days ago (1 children)

The red panda. Aside from Turning Red and, oh yeah, Mozilla Firefox, they don’t get much love in popular culture. They don’t even have them in Animal Crossing!

[–] early_riser@lemmy.world 2 points 2 days ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

There’s the Ponya from Torchlight 2

edit: also re: firefox, AFAIK they've been using a red fox as a mascot at least since 2006 when I first discovered it, at least they already had the classic fox and globe logo.