It’s common in fantasy and sci-fi to have multiple distinct sapient species (races). How did all of yours come about and survive to the present day without any one species becoming dominant while the rest went the way of archaic humans?
My world doesn’t have any moon or stars, so keeping track of seasons is a lot harder. That makes agriculture really hard, so populations are only as big as can be supported by hunting, fishing, and gathering. This means everyone had more time to evolve and develop sapience and cultures. Still, that’s only 5 people species for me, one of which is extinct and another of which is a kind of plant.
In one of my settings, this is taken into account, sort of. The world spans ages. In the first age, magic is so plentiful that entire species, at various levels of sapience/sentience, were created by random accidental acts of magical creation. By the third age, most have disappeared, leaving areas dominated by single species. By the fifth, only non-magical life remains, just humans, and there is no sixth.
There are only two sapient species in the Lonely Galaxy, humans and yinrih. There is a closely related non sapient species to the yinrih, closer even than chimps are to humans, and the question of why the yinrih are sapient and the tree dwellers are not drives a lot of philosophizing on the yinrih’s part. The Atavists in particular resent the burdens of existential dread and moral guilt that come with having a rational soul and wish to return to being irrational animals.
Most of the peoples in Aedelor, the world my partner and I work on, were created by gods either directly or indirectly. Souls are real and inform the ancestry you will be, and gods tinker with souls to create new kinds of life. Very rarely, non-god entities have been able to do this as well, most notably giants and dragons have both achieved the feat in different methods.
