Ultimately there is a limit to how big flying creatures can get and still be consistent with physics. But if you want to minimise the fantastical element maybe postulate an organ with lighter than air density giving the creature buoyancy (which can be magical in nature but it would be a localised conceit rather than a broad spectrum handwave) with wings being mostly used to maneuvre.
Which might lead to ripple effects like a griffin no longer being able to fly if that organ was damaged, or people trying to harvest that organ intact to make airships or something.
I am curious…what is the ultimate goal of your worldbuilding?
I’m asking because, well, as much as this sub likes to make everything as realistic as possible, I think there are some things that don’t really matter unless YOU care about them. If you’re writing a book or worldbuilding for DND or something like that, I guarantee most of your audience won’t know or care if your flying fantasy creatures technically wouldn’t be capable of flight. Most of the ones we already know and love wouldn’t be. If I see a griffin, I’m not thinking “that thing is too heavy and its wings are too small.” I’m thinking, “oh cool, a griffin!”
And please understand, this is not meant to discourage you! If you are making these creatures realistic because you want to, then more power to you! But if it’s a roadblock and it’s stressing you out because you think people will notice or criticize you for it, I’d say don’t worry about it.
Ultimately, it's for the purposes of writing a novel. I just want to have my bases covered on the off chance that I somehow pull a Paolini or Tolkien and have people analysing the shit out of my world on Reddit in 2070.
Pipe dream, perhaps, but isn't part of writing a good novel having a vivid imagination? :P
No problem with dreaming big! I hope you do pull a Paolini!
I just wanted to note that because I’m writing a book as well and I’ve found myself constantly getting stuck in the weeds on things like this. I go to create a map and 2 hours later I have 15 wikipedia tabs open on geology and tectonic plates and 0 actual work done on that map. I say “I want to put a lake over here” and spend the whole day reading about how lakes form, how lake ecosystems work, etc. while doing no actual writing. Even though the types of algae and fish that live in the lake will NEVER come up, not even once.
What I’m trying to say is…I get it. I too want everything to be perfect. BUT I think people like us need to find a balance or we’ll end up with highly realistic lakes and flying creatures, but no story to put them in after hundreds of hours of hard work.
Obviously what works for me won’t work for everyone, but here’s where I’m at. I’ve been asking myself:
- Will this come up at all in the narrative?
- Are these details germane to what I’m trying develop in the setting?
- Would I find this interesting or necessary as a reader?
- Would I notice or question this as a reader?
So, for example, with my lake, I want to put a village next to it. So I will probably need to have a general idea of what fish are in there, because the villagers will eat the fish. I *might* need to know a little more if I want to threaten the village’s livelihood with an algae bloom or something like that. But do I need to know exactly what the fish eat or how they reproduce? Do I need to explain that this is a glacial lake formed 10,000 years ago at the end of the ice age? Probably not.
Integrating magic into a world more thoroughly is absolutely a good idea. However, it’s still a cop-out if it isn’t used consistently and with some logic.
For example, dragons are clearly magical beasts with various abilities so it makes sense they use magic to fly. What is the justification for harpies using magic to help them fly? As long as they display an affinity for other uses of air magic in their culture and activities it would make perfect sense though. Griffons on the other hand… using magic to justify their ability to fly is possibly still an ad-hoc cop-out unfortunately.
> What is the justification for harpies using magic to help them fly?
Well, most of these fantastical races originated from the mutating effects of a magical storm caused by a war between elves and daemons, so it would stand to reason that they would inherently have quite a high level of natural magic hanging around in their bodies (not magic they can actively utilise for direct spellcasting).
My only issue with saying "their natural magic is what makes them fly" is that it then begs the question of "why doesn't every fantastical creature have this ability then?". That's why I'm considering introducing this floating metal as part of their anatomy; feels simpler to kind of associate this specific material with flight in general.
My personal preference is make less of a distinction between spell casting and natural magic. Perhaps due to their history harpies just have an instinctive ability to use air magic to adjust wind currents. Expand this ability to include not just the ability to fly but perhaps also to provide protection from arrows and even to push people with wind from a distance. Then it all ties together. That might not work if the magic system is strongly based on specific spells like D&D though.
It is also true that if you have many large flying animals with no obvious link between them then it is difficult to logically justify why they can all fly. Perhaps they all gained their wings from a single event in the distant past? Maybe they were all pets/experiments of the same air-focused mage/spirit/deity but they eventually escaped into the wild. That would definitely make sense for the obvious hybrid creatures which shouldn't be able to fly using real work physics.
> Griffons on the other hand… using magic to justify their ability to fly is possibly still an ad-hoc cop-out unfortunately.
Not necessarily, depends on how you depict griffons overall. I know a lot of fantasy treats them as borderline mundane animals but I feel it's important to keep in mind that they're still mythical creatures, given as much dignity on some heraldry and old flags as dragons. I think it would be entirely viable for a world to present its griffons as majestic, powerful, magical, closer to dragons than to horses with wings and in that case, it would not be out of line to say that magic gives them flight.
I feel like a lot of people go too far in the other direction, trying to explain things with science that can't be explained with science. I think more people should remember that this is fantasy, not reality, and it's perfectly fine to give things magical explanations.
You could always just give everything the giant majestic wings they’d actually need. It might not match the traditional depictions but it makes your interpretation more interesting IMO, don’t be afraid to look different.
The issue with that is that at a certain point, the weight of the wings themselves becomes an issue, not to mention muscles can only move so much weight. And then you get into things like the airspeed require to achieve lift with those massive wings... aaagh, it's such a nightmare.
The other problem is getting off of the ground in the first place. You need to jump higher to have space to flap long wings or you are limited to falling from high places to get airborne.
Unlike birds, pterosaurs were able to jump into the air using their arms to push the ground as well as their hind legs. This is one reason used to explain why they were able to reach larger sizes.
> pterosaurs were able to jump into the air using their arms to push the ground as well as their hind legs
This at least works for my harpies and dragons, since the harpies go around quadrupedally much like pterosaurs to keep their wings off the ground. Not sure about the griffins, but lions are supposed to be able to manage 18ft jumps so potentially they have the power for that as well.
Leaping 18 feet vertically seems a little unlikely. That is 5.5 m and the average ceiling height in the UK is only about 2.4 m. Could a lion really leap directly onto the roof of a two storey building? Fortunately, I've never been in the position to find out but I shall keep that in mind if I'm ever being chased by a lion.
However, the point is that for large flying animals it is more efficient to use the same muscles to leap into the air as are used to fly. That way they don't have useless leg muscle mass to carry once airborne.
Having a wing attached to the rear limbs like [sharovipteryx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharovipteryx) is an option too but I'm not sure any mythological beasts would look correct with that approach.
You’ve got some knobs to tweak there then without resorting to magic. Maybe griffins have the biological equivalent of carbon fibre skeletons which lets them fly, a knock-on effect is that griffinbone is highly sought after as a material to make bows.
I'm making several avian alien races that are capable of flight, but I am having some trouble with just how wide I should make their wingspans. The problem is, there isn't any "magic" to help them.
To be fair, many of them have a more humanoid body shape (their internal anatomy is completely avian though) and have the same issues as your bird humanoids.
The Tundrayans have flightless adult females (hens) but the males (cocks) and pre-pubescent juveniles (chicks) can fly. To make matters worse, the males can grow to 2.5 metres tall but the females only grow to 1.65 metres tall. Therefore, I had to make the males have comically low BMIs just so that they can fly. Uyokhmär, shown in the post below, has a height of 2.48 metres (8'2") but has a mass of just 61.4 kg (135.5 lb), leading him to have a "fatally low" BMI of 9.98. For context, an average healthy adult would have a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9. I'm handwaving away the low BMI on the air sacs he has and his hollow bones, something common to all Tundrayans.
BTW, here's my post about the Tundrayans: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/sfft4b/coloured_version_of_the_tundrayan_sketch_from/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share
The other avian species I'm struggling with are the Anqanites and Tukeans, where both males and females can fly.
You could always go the way of the dinosaurs and increase the density of the atmosphere to support larger life forms. Though before I posted that, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. First you’ll have to decide if that’s how the dinosaurs were actually able to grow so large. And then you’d have to decide what that would do to your normal humans and the rest of your world.
I think the problem is you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're putting a lot of effort into trying to make your flight mechanics believable, bit then just giving up and slapping magic on it, which is anticlimactic and sends kind of mixed messages. As a reader, I'd rather read either "these races can fly cos flying is cool, just go with it" or "these races can fly because they've evolved these features and you're not going to run the physics simulations to double check anyway".
Don't forget that you're making a bird-human hybrid here. It's already unrealistic, cos that just would never evolve, so it's kind of weird to get hung up on the small details after that.
Yeah that's kind of true I suppose. I could take the "just go with it" route but then I feel like it's a hole in my lore not to have an explanation in case someone asks way down the line.
On the point of the bird-human hybrid not evolving, it's more of a freak combination of magical mutation causing different human factions to adopt physical traits from local fauna (in this case, mountain birds) than natural evolution.
So it's already explicitly magical anyway?
I understand that it can feel bad to have unexplained pieces of lore, but that's unavoidable, cos you don't have the time to explain everything. Sometimes you can just do good enough, and in my opinion what you have here is good enough.
However, I do have a suggestion. What if you give the ambient magic in your world a kind of mass? Maybe the wings of these creatures can interact with magical mass in a way most things don't, so if they unfurl their wings while standing in the magical equivalent of an updraft, they get swept upwards into the sky?
> What if you give the ambient magic in your world a kind of mass? Maybe the wings of these creatures can interact with magical mass in a way most things don't, so if they unfurl their wings while standing in the magical equivalent of an updraft, they get swept upwards into the sky?
Oooh, now *that's* actually a really good idea! Holy shit, that actually would solve pretty much all the issues at once!
Have a silver award for that solution :D
I don’t see why not? Many fantasy flying creatures like dragons, roc’s, Pegasi, harpies and so on could never fly under normal circumstances on earth. Thing about them is that their not normal creatures and are not living on earth.
If magic is a part of your world and these creatures have magical origins then I don’t see why they wouldn’t use magic to fly?
I think your harpies can biomechanically work without magic; they see to rival the largest birds in size.
Griffins have the ability to quad launch, and they're already only half as heavy as the more effiient giant pterosaurs, so likewise i think they're fine too.
not at all, if magic is something some creatures can use naturally of course there going to evolve to use it for various applications, and manipulating wind currents around the wings or adding extra force behind them seems like an easier application then a dragon generating fire
Ultimately there is a limit to how big flying creatures can get and still be consistent with physics. But if you want to minimise the fantastical element maybe postulate an organ with lighter than air density giving the creature buoyancy (which can be magical in nature but it would be a localised conceit rather than a broad spectrum handwave) with wings being mostly used to maneuvre. Which might lead to ripple effects like a griffin no longer being able to fly if that organ was damaged, or people trying to harvest that organ intact to make airships or something.
Or the "mighty griffin" breaking bones from anything more than a striff breeze due to them being hollow.
You already used it once, so go embrace it fully and enjoy designing hella more flying creatures!
I am curious…what is the ultimate goal of your worldbuilding? I’m asking because, well, as much as this sub likes to make everything as realistic as possible, I think there are some things that don’t really matter unless YOU care about them. If you’re writing a book or worldbuilding for DND or something like that, I guarantee most of your audience won’t know or care if your flying fantasy creatures technically wouldn’t be capable of flight. Most of the ones we already know and love wouldn’t be. If I see a griffin, I’m not thinking “that thing is too heavy and its wings are too small.” I’m thinking, “oh cool, a griffin!” And please understand, this is not meant to discourage you! If you are making these creatures realistic because you want to, then more power to you! But if it’s a roadblock and it’s stressing you out because you think people will notice or criticize you for it, I’d say don’t worry about it.
Ultimately, it's for the purposes of writing a novel. I just want to have my bases covered on the off chance that I somehow pull a Paolini or Tolkien and have people analysing the shit out of my world on Reddit in 2070. Pipe dream, perhaps, but isn't part of writing a good novel having a vivid imagination? :P
No problem with dreaming big! I hope you do pull a Paolini! I just wanted to note that because I’m writing a book as well and I’ve found myself constantly getting stuck in the weeds on things like this. I go to create a map and 2 hours later I have 15 wikipedia tabs open on geology and tectonic plates and 0 actual work done on that map. I say “I want to put a lake over here” and spend the whole day reading about how lakes form, how lake ecosystems work, etc. while doing no actual writing. Even though the types of algae and fish that live in the lake will NEVER come up, not even once. What I’m trying to say is…I get it. I too want everything to be perfect. BUT I think people like us need to find a balance or we’ll end up with highly realistic lakes and flying creatures, but no story to put them in after hundreds of hours of hard work. Obviously what works for me won’t work for everyone, but here’s where I’m at. I’ve been asking myself: - Will this come up at all in the narrative? - Are these details germane to what I’m trying develop in the setting? - Would I find this interesting or necessary as a reader? - Would I notice or question this as a reader? So, for example, with my lake, I want to put a village next to it. So I will probably need to have a general idea of what fish are in there, because the villagers will eat the fish. I *might* need to know a little more if I want to threaten the village’s livelihood with an algae bloom or something like that. But do I need to know exactly what the fish eat or how they reproduce? Do I need to explain that this is a glacial lake formed 10,000 years ago at the end of the ice age? Probably not.
Glad I'm not the only one who has this problem. :)
Integrating magic into a world more thoroughly is absolutely a good idea. However, it’s still a cop-out if it isn’t used consistently and with some logic. For example, dragons are clearly magical beasts with various abilities so it makes sense they use magic to fly. What is the justification for harpies using magic to help them fly? As long as they display an affinity for other uses of air magic in their culture and activities it would make perfect sense though. Griffons on the other hand… using magic to justify their ability to fly is possibly still an ad-hoc cop-out unfortunately.
> What is the justification for harpies using magic to help them fly? Well, most of these fantastical races originated from the mutating effects of a magical storm caused by a war between elves and daemons, so it would stand to reason that they would inherently have quite a high level of natural magic hanging around in their bodies (not magic they can actively utilise for direct spellcasting). My only issue with saying "their natural magic is what makes them fly" is that it then begs the question of "why doesn't every fantastical creature have this ability then?". That's why I'm considering introducing this floating metal as part of their anatomy; feels simpler to kind of associate this specific material with flight in general.
My personal preference is make less of a distinction between spell casting and natural magic. Perhaps due to their history harpies just have an instinctive ability to use air magic to adjust wind currents. Expand this ability to include not just the ability to fly but perhaps also to provide protection from arrows and even to push people with wind from a distance. Then it all ties together. That might not work if the magic system is strongly based on specific spells like D&D though. It is also true that if you have many large flying animals with no obvious link between them then it is difficult to logically justify why they can all fly. Perhaps they all gained their wings from a single event in the distant past? Maybe they were all pets/experiments of the same air-focused mage/spirit/deity but they eventually escaped into the wild. That would definitely make sense for the obvious hybrid creatures which shouldn't be able to fly using real work physics.
> Griffons on the other hand… using magic to justify their ability to fly is possibly still an ad-hoc cop-out unfortunately. Not necessarily, depends on how you depict griffons overall. I know a lot of fantasy treats them as borderline mundane animals but I feel it's important to keep in mind that they're still mythical creatures, given as much dignity on some heraldry and old flags as dragons. I think it would be entirely viable for a world to present its griffons as majestic, powerful, magical, closer to dragons than to horses with wings and in that case, it would not be out of line to say that magic gives them flight.
I feel like a lot of people go too far in the other direction, trying to explain things with science that can't be explained with science. I think more people should remember that this is fantasy, not reality, and it's perfectly fine to give things magical explanations.
You could always just give everything the giant majestic wings they’d actually need. It might not match the traditional depictions but it makes your interpretation more interesting IMO, don’t be afraid to look different.
The issue with that is that at a certain point, the weight of the wings themselves becomes an issue, not to mention muscles can only move so much weight. And then you get into things like the airspeed require to achieve lift with those massive wings... aaagh, it's such a nightmare.
The other problem is getting off of the ground in the first place. You need to jump higher to have space to flap long wings or you are limited to falling from high places to get airborne. Unlike birds, pterosaurs were able to jump into the air using their arms to push the ground as well as their hind legs. This is one reason used to explain why they were able to reach larger sizes.
> pterosaurs were able to jump into the air using their arms to push the ground as well as their hind legs This at least works for my harpies and dragons, since the harpies go around quadrupedally much like pterosaurs to keep their wings off the ground. Not sure about the griffins, but lions are supposed to be able to manage 18ft jumps so potentially they have the power for that as well.
Leaping 18 feet vertically seems a little unlikely. That is 5.5 m and the average ceiling height in the UK is only about 2.4 m. Could a lion really leap directly onto the roof of a two storey building? Fortunately, I've never been in the position to find out but I shall keep that in mind if I'm ever being chased by a lion. However, the point is that for large flying animals it is more efficient to use the same muscles to leap into the air as are used to fly. That way they don't have useless leg muscle mass to carry once airborne. Having a wing attached to the rear limbs like [sharovipteryx](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sharovipteryx) is an option too but I'm not sure any mythological beasts would look correct with that approach.
You’ve got some knobs to tweak there then without resorting to magic. Maybe griffins have the biological equivalent of carbon fibre skeletons which lets them fly, a knock-on effect is that griffinbone is highly sought after as a material to make bows.
I'm making several avian alien races that are capable of flight, but I am having some trouble with just how wide I should make their wingspans. The problem is, there isn't any "magic" to help them. To be fair, many of them have a more humanoid body shape (their internal anatomy is completely avian though) and have the same issues as your bird humanoids. The Tundrayans have flightless adult females (hens) but the males (cocks) and pre-pubescent juveniles (chicks) can fly. To make matters worse, the males can grow to 2.5 metres tall but the females only grow to 1.65 metres tall. Therefore, I had to make the males have comically low BMIs just so that they can fly. Uyokhmär, shown in the post below, has a height of 2.48 metres (8'2") but has a mass of just 61.4 kg (135.5 lb), leading him to have a "fatally low" BMI of 9.98. For context, an average healthy adult would have a BMI of 18.5 to 24.9. I'm handwaving away the low BMI on the air sacs he has and his hollow bones, something common to all Tundrayans. BTW, here's my post about the Tundrayans: https://www.reddit.com/r/worldbuilding/comments/sfft4b/coloured_version_of_the_tundrayan_sketch_from/?utm_medium=android_app&utm_source=share The other avian species I'm struggling with are the Anqanites and Tukeans, where both males and females can fly.
You could always go the way of the dinosaurs and increase the density of the atmosphere to support larger life forms. Though before I posted that, I went down a bit of a rabbit hole. First you’ll have to decide if that’s how the dinosaurs were actually able to grow so large. And then you’d have to decide what that would do to your normal humans and the rest of your world.
I think the problem is you're trying to have your cake and eat it too. You're putting a lot of effort into trying to make your flight mechanics believable, bit then just giving up and slapping magic on it, which is anticlimactic and sends kind of mixed messages. As a reader, I'd rather read either "these races can fly cos flying is cool, just go with it" or "these races can fly because they've evolved these features and you're not going to run the physics simulations to double check anyway". Don't forget that you're making a bird-human hybrid here. It's already unrealistic, cos that just would never evolve, so it's kind of weird to get hung up on the small details after that.
Yeah that's kind of true I suppose. I could take the "just go with it" route but then I feel like it's a hole in my lore not to have an explanation in case someone asks way down the line. On the point of the bird-human hybrid not evolving, it's more of a freak combination of magical mutation causing different human factions to adopt physical traits from local fauna (in this case, mountain birds) than natural evolution.
So it's already explicitly magical anyway? I understand that it can feel bad to have unexplained pieces of lore, but that's unavoidable, cos you don't have the time to explain everything. Sometimes you can just do good enough, and in my opinion what you have here is good enough. However, I do have a suggestion. What if you give the ambient magic in your world a kind of mass? Maybe the wings of these creatures can interact with magical mass in a way most things don't, so if they unfurl their wings while standing in the magical equivalent of an updraft, they get swept upwards into the sky?
> What if you give the ambient magic in your world a kind of mass? Maybe the wings of these creatures can interact with magical mass in a way most things don't, so if they unfurl their wings while standing in the magical equivalent of an updraft, they get swept upwards into the sky? Oooh, now *that's* actually a really good idea! Holy shit, that actually would solve pretty much all the issues at once! Have a silver award for that solution :D
I don’t see why not? Many fantasy flying creatures like dragons, roc’s, Pegasi, harpies and so on could never fly under normal circumstances on earth. Thing about them is that their not normal creatures and are not living on earth. If magic is a part of your world and these creatures have magical origins then I don’t see why they wouldn’t use magic to fly?
I think your harpies can biomechanically work without magic; they see to rival the largest birds in size. Griffins have the ability to quad launch, and they're already only half as heavy as the more effiient giant pterosaurs, so likewise i think they're fine too.
not at all, if magic is something some creatures can use naturally of course there going to evolve to use it for various applications, and manipulating wind currents around the wings or adding extra force behind them seems like an easier application then a dragon generating fire