Slimes. no contest. They're literally everywhere, no matter the type of environment. From the deepest part of the ocean, volcanic area, the freezing poles, and even the stratospheres, there's always some species of slimes making their home there.
The volt (short for voltaics) are the ancestors of those humans that did not escape to the safety of the vestibules when the Annex began their terraforming of earth, one of the nanite "plagues" they released began forcibly transforming plants, animals, and people into bio-tech monstrosities, the volt were the only new species created by these nanites to maintain their human intelligence.
They now have photovoltaic skin and can survive solely on sunlight. After many years on the surface without seeing "normal" humans and afterwards having many negative interactions with them when they did reappear the volt are largely aggressive towards humans, not really knowing that they are humans due to the specialized suits they must now wear to survive on the surface. These suits are associated with danger and an enemy by the volt but also as a source of incredible valuable technology.
Are you saying that volt are the same people from back then, transformed and with immortal/long lifespans, or are the volt an offshoot of humanity? If I saw a volt I was related to, would I be seeing my great (×N) grandpa, or my (Nth) cousin?
Being largely technological beings and living off of sunlight yes, there are many volt that are still alive from back then. They are capable of reproducing but do so quite slowly as the nanites altered much of their biology and anatomy. But there are still tens of thousands of volt from the beginning.
But they formed a society, or are they so few compared to what human population once was that they cannot form anything substantial? I think it would be interesting as hell exploring this sort of "self-imposed" loneliness that could come from their negative relation with humans.
Humans, like cockroaches, and worse, hybridize the most.
You blink and they try to set up another empire.
The only species that was close are the ratfolk, and they managed to get themselves nearly wiped out.
Multiple things
First started a genocidal war against everyone, lost and lived in isolation, constantly trying wars and get their heads bashed in.
Then a few centuries later stole a dragon hatchling
Humans as well in mine. To the point that the the last great elven empire is trying to commit genocide against the humans out of fear more than anything. “In 3 generations we watched humans go from nomadic tribes to building cities to rival our own. In 2 more generations those cities United into empires that rivaled our own and they outnumber us 3 to 1. Imagine what kind of position we’ll be in 2 more generations from now”
My High Elves claimed such too.
Now there aren't that many left, and their territory has even more shortlived species living there.
But then they've claimed anyone else should just submit to them.
They also constantly wage war with each other. Develop massive supercolonies that span continents, some species engage in purely raiding, others farm, some even maintain livestock. There is another one that kidnaps ant children and enslaves them.
I used ants as the basis of the Formancai in my world, a massive ant society that outnumbers everyone. It’s simultaneously the least unified society and the most.
If we’re talking about sentient races, that would go to the Morforwyn. Merfolk who appear more fish-like than a human-fish hybrid. They lay about over 1,000 eggs, though usually only about 100 or so hatch and only about 30 manage to live to adulthood.
If we’re talking about species as a whole, then it’s a tie between Trolls and Carpuna.
Trolls are a Macro Virus in my world (Macro as in tall as two full grown men), and they inject their genetic makeup into their hosts body where it infects their cells and causes these cells to start making a Trollyp, and if the host doesn’t have the right organs to hold the Trollyp, the infected cells will infect an organ and turn that organ into a uterus. The Organ in question is usually one of the Livers or the Appendix, and in rare cases a cancer cell or the bladder. And since Trolls don’t require the host to be male, female, young, old, or even the same species, they grow fast.
Carpuna are a fish that evolved to be eaten, they evolved bioluminescence to attract predators and are willing to get in the way of a predator just to be eaten, they’re even known to actively throw themselves on spears and tridents, and even beach themselves only when predators are around. And despite being suicidal animals, they still have one of the largest populations, since they lay near indestructible eggs, and one Carpuna can lay over 1,000,000,000,000 eggs and about 98% of those eggs will hatch and make it to adulthood, and the only reason they make it to adulthood is because they reach it after being 1 hour old, and by that hour, any female Carpuna will be getting ready to lay more eggs. Only reason they don’t overpopulate, other than the mass suicide, is that the eggs hatch after 1 year, by that time, about 20% of the previous Carpuna population would be dead.
Now I know it’s not my world, but it would make for a really cool story if the only difference between them was something small and really hard to distinguish. If that were in an urban environment you could have a really cool game of cat and mouse with the humans and the Euman soldiers.
But also the E.
Eumans have more developed brains and better reflexes. They also have lighter skin pigmentation (not a reference to race, just aesthetic). They also are more durable and can survive harsher conditions, as they are basically more evolved humans.
Oh, boy.
>They also have lighter skin pigmentation (not a reference to race, just aesthetic).
Dude, just take that out. That's like naming a race the n-word and saying "it isn't a reference to race, I just like how it sounds". Worldbuilding isn't done in a vacuum.
Ye, gonna be honest, if the whole skin pigmentation is just aesthetic, you may just be better off taking that out
Maybe instead of them just being lighter, you could have them be in stronger colors, like really really dark brown or like neon blue (but not glowing)
Eyes and hair would also be a way to make them visually distinct without triggering people’s racism alarms. Or you could make racism a huge thing in your world too.
So their just better, Whiter humans?
Even if that's not the intention, I feel like you're setting yourself up for failure with that whole skin pigmentation thing.
I'm imagining less pink and more Alien Prometheus marble white, but that's just me. The Engineers didn't come across racist to me, and they're literally bigger, better, whiter "humans"
Ooooh. I thought it was more like translucent skin than color. Yeah I don't wanna be the one to say the quiet part out loud buuut it seems a bit too "Master-Racey" I'd do clearer skin for sure. More visible veins, slightly more reddish/pinkish depending on gender, how translucent they are, maybe the more translucent ones are weaker/stronger. ("Defective") Perhaps? But that might go down the whole "eugenics" thing...
Depends on the time, humans normally have the highest mortals at their peak, but humans being humans do something to cause them to o nearly extinct, from fighting other mortal races to even nearly wiping themselves out completely, humans are a bunch that repopulate at a rate that puts rabbits to shame
Huh… well my world is full of anthropomorphic animal people… just a sec…
*(one Google search later)*
So rats are the most numerous mammalian animals (7 billion) and chickens are the most numerous birds (30 billion). I tried to find results for reptiles and amphibians, but it wasn’t quite as explicit. I think it said frogs / toads were the biggest family of amphibians.
Though chickens probably wouldn’t be as common in a world where there are no humans raising them and moving them around. Rats either actually. But I think that’s a good answer. Rats, chickens, and frog / toad anthros can be the most numerous of the animal people.
My world is called Beanquest it takes place in a world where humanity already on the brink of all out nuclear war suddenly gains access to magic and like immediately enchanted the nukes so when nuclear war did break out the effects were even worse. Eventually after humans died out, radiation mixed with raw magical energy leaked into a seed vault and a kidney bean sprout absorbed a lot of it. causing the bean that grew from said sprout to be a literal all powerful sentient god that brought the rest of the beans to life. Now pretty much all of Europe, which is the kidney beans domain is inhabited by beans.
Yes actually for the first campaign of Beanquest which I’m still in progress of making the player characters are only allowed to beans but there are so many different types. There liverbeans they are direct descendants of the kidney bean and are minor demigods, capable of short range telekinesis, aqua beans that instead of hands have large crab like claws and also get several buffs when underwater, there’s Shadow beans that actually evolved from jellybeans and are incredibly capable in dark magic. The list goes on.
I can't even express how enthused I am by this. If you're in need of any playtesting at all, please let me know. I blog solo actual plays and would love to try this out whenever it's ready!
Edit: To be clear, would happily pay to try a Beanquest RPG
With all species combined, technically it'd be elves (every species of them), followed by humans (dwarves in my world are a species of human, so they're lumped in here with humans), tied with orcs, and so on (I'm sorry, there's just so many species in my world). You should've said SAPIENT species, though.
As individual species, each species of elf barely even surpasses the population of beast races, and the most populous species of elf hardly even comes close to the population of goblins.
I can't go into good detail or give exact numbers.
Haas, the adaptive rabbity style of Lamarckian evolvers who make themselves into whatever works for the environment. Guys are basically everywhere and outnumber humans probably 10 000 to 1
Imagine an alien species of fly like aliens, their quantity so massive that their world is completely engulfed by them, and all other natural resources consumed entirely. Of course, science would be curious about such a place, so the few settlements spread around this planet are protected by an emancipation grid, but the sound of bugs getting zapped 24/7 isn’t exactly ideal.
For umbrella terms, it would be Fae or The Nih(Various Asian Mythos yokai, Oni, and the like). For non umbrella terms, it would be Slimes from the 3 Slimes who gained Eldritch level powers to the weakest would be over 500 Nonnillion or more.
Anthros that call themselves humans. Though, I can't say what individual species is the most common. Of my existing characters it's probably canids and if it's not, then it's otters.
Daemons. Normally they’re basically psychic bacterial mold, so there are millions of them floating around any given person’s head gobbling up the emotional energy they release.
If too many gather in one spot it gets to be a problem and they might form a visible macroscopic body, but that’s relatively rare.
Romero's a type of zombie in my story I'm writing. In my world scientist ran an experiment between dec 23 1969 and Jan 8 1970 that successfully reanimated a deceased individual. Though unlike most stories, the individual "Frank Nowak" retained all of his previous self and was considered the first member of a sub species of human called the returned. But later in 2003 after thousands of people brought back the first "Romero" appeared and caused a major zombie outbreak in the eastern US. It took 6 weeks most of the us east of the Mississippi to be infected. It took 3 months for the western hemisphere and 4 months after that most of the world. The main reason the world fell within a year was that you didn't need to be bit just had to get infected cells into your body. So as of the story now Romero's are about 5.6 bil to 781 mil humans.
If it's anything like IRL the answer is probably ants for just about any setting, if we're going by just the number of individuals. Ants are kicking ass in this regard. In terms of biomass (total mass of all individuals), it's probably some kind of crab. Arthropods are just OP.
Fiction beings rapidly populate the word because any idea for a character can become one. Despite their numbers and superior abilities they are still all slaves to humanity due to their nature of being just ideas brought to life.
I have no clue. There are many species (tigers, lions, wolves foxes, dholes, otters, polecats, bears, panthers, leopards, birds of prey, etc) and numbers for each are uncertain, and with all the wars, you can't just go and ask for population statistics. There are many unaccounted for. This is just one region. Populations could be completely different on different parts of the planet. Humans didn't exist in the region for thousands of years until they arrived a few centuries prior.
Lapis_Wolf
Of the sapient beings its neck and neck between the Darklings and humans. Both breed like rabbits and have fairly short lifespans. But of all the creatures the nematodes still rain supreme in terms of population. There are around 57 billion nematodes per human on earth and climbing.
In my nobledark fantasy world? Mixed human/aleqoto, followed by Humans, followed by the Aleqoto, followed by human/jueqani, then followed by the other assorted races created by the Jueqani, then by the Jueqani themselves
In my desert punk sci fi world? The yet unnamed four armed guys, followed by the yet unnamed human equivalents - the reverse is true if we’re speaking for the solar system as a whole, rather than just the one world which I’ve yet to name(this is a relatively new project). There’s an extinct ancient species, and another which is more like a living psychic virus that manipulates organic and semi organic matter, and all but the most primitive technology.
Nobody knows but it is probally either Karartans, star covering organic satelites that create matryoshka brains, or Yumuris, cannibal frogs :d
Both species cover large parts of the galaxy, so much that yumuri horde created a culture named "Refugees". Whic is a wave of nomads advancing ahead of it, formed by other species and civilizations escaping the advance of the Yumuris. They tour the galaxy, chasing each other, just like the hour and minute hands of a clock. If the Karartans had not conquered humanity first, humans would have gone extinct or joined the refugees because of yumuri threat
Yumuris look like this https://www.reddit.com/r/worldjerking/s/OrJydnXncI
The Ki'Yek... small flying aliens. quick generations, no concept of birth control and recent acsess to space infrastructure means they're doing *pretty well* on the galactic census. they're like the size of a groundhog and apperently disinterested in empire though, so nobody's really worried. you'll find them basically everywhere, hocking their talents as freelance farmers, craftspeople and linguists.
Orcs. Counting all of Aquaria, there are around 600 million orcs just in the "civilized world", aka sovereign states, not counting secluded tribes and communities. Goblins are the runner-up with around 577 million individuals around.
Humans are only around 140 million, concentrating mostly inside the United Empire. Elves are about 110 million.
The Quantadons are a extraterrestrial species that populate the darkest corners of the universe, probably over a thousand septillions of them across the space.
If we’re going for a single world, then there are the Kahlls, a fish people who out populated their planet, and many have moved to different worlds as a result. Their original world has up to 26 billion Kahlls residing in it.
Humans followed by succubi. Unless you only count purebloods, at which point it would probably be elves. They rarely have children outside their race, and when they do the children are almost always ostracized. So maybe you will find the descendants of an elf, but elf/other race couples are extremely rare. A few noble families do it because half-elves can age more quickly, and therefore join society as adults faster. "My 23 year old son will become an adult and get a real job in two years" doesn't go over well with majority human nobles, as humans are adults at 15, and elves at 25. So many of them just assume you are babying your kids in their low 20, even if it is the same as them not expecting a 13 or 14 year old to get a job
Probably tied between Humans and Vespids. Of the four Elder Races (the four mortal races that have been around the longest) humans have the advantage. The Fey don’t really reproduce anymore after they “ascended”, the Slyth don’t exist anymore, and the Giants reproduce extremely slowly and have low numbers to begin with. Humans reproduce at an average rate (1-2 kids per year on average), they live a decently long life span (50-60 years at least), and they’ve been around for a long time.
The Vespids on the other hand reproduce exceptionally quickly (anywhere from 100 to 2,000 eggs per cycle), balanced out by their short life spans (20 years at most). Despite being a relatively new race, they’ve already established several “superhives”, and are thought to be on equal standing with the humans population wise.
Slimes industrialized their reproduction so there are trillions of them, which is balanced with most of them comitting suicide after living just one year.
This population explosion happened in two decades, and it's one of the ways slimes have shocked most societies into a drawn out collapse.
If we go by individual species, humans are definitely the most populous.
But if you group all faun races together, from minotaurs to satyrs to pegtauri (pegasus centaurs) to merfolk to werewolves to keynomi (anime-esque animal folk), then they would be a close second if not beat humans out for first place. But since they are so divided throughout the world, have many races within the group hidden and basically unknown to the wider world, and only have that they have animal traits to unite them, the vast majority of people don't count it nor actually group them like that. The term faun isn't even a common term in-world and most that use it don't mean it well.
Humans, because humans are the invariable result of interbreeding between other species. All humans are basically true-breeding mongrels from elves, orcs, dwarves, halflings, and so on, which is why they're roughly middle-of-the-road in terms of characteristics.
Afflicted human variants that have the characteristics of ants. They live underground and once they get an additional boost of mutation following a massive magical battle, they emerge and attempt to take over the world.
Yes Iiked hunterxhunter. I also just love ants
Intelligent species would probably be the Beastlings, created originally from dragons doing dragon things. But out of any biological and mechanical species it would probably be dragons and other draconics. Out of all forms of life including auroric and particulate life would probably be Kashinotoa.
Demons in human host bodies.
The rest of humanity are essentially
vessels for vice. Those who speak out or oppose are put in the queue for becoming a host, where there’s not a super high survival rate if you’re not there by choice.
Most of the surface wold doesn’t known it, but it’s a symbiotic duo of snail-folk and crab-folk that essentially police the rims of the deep dark abyssal parts of the ocean and keep god knows what from crawling out of it. They’ve waged ocean-floor-sized wars against abyssal horrors, with rarely a murmur noted on the surface.
While technically just two species, each has many subspecies adapted to the various biomes of the ocean floor.
Surface races know of only the shallow water variants such as coral reef inhabitants, playful and colorful; tidal basin variants, no-nonsense and fast moving; and the rare land-adapted variants, who can actually survive fine on dry land for extended periods.
These have many dealings and trade deals with the orcs and elves etc, as well as with their neighbors in slightly deeper waters, who trade and rap with the folks in slightly deeper waters… etc.
At some point you get to the true floor-dwellers, who typically congregate around deep sea chimneys or vast combs they’ve built to filter bio-food out of the water. These are massive, slow moving, powerful, and heavily armored creatures, who still see themselves as watchful guardians at the precipice of fathomless deeps
Tessans!!
I haven’t come up with the specific names for the native people, but Tessa is the most densely populated planet in the system. The Tessans, out of the other planets’ inhabitants, are the closest to humans.
I'm going to wisely assume you meant "sapient species" in your question. =p
Assuming I'm right, humans are the most widespread and numerous of Aerone's sapient life, but as is common in worlds I make, they're only about 50% of the planet's population. (I estimated Aerone's population as about 2.5 billion people, so about 1.25 billion humans, and 1.25 billion total anemoi, drakkhen, dwarves, elves, half-elves, kalashtar, nekou, quai, souris, and tieflings.)
Halflings.
When the elves created them the halflings were meant to be fun loving entertainers and companions. Halflings also when mixing with humans the child is either halfling or human with a higher chance of being a halfling. Thus halflings have become the most populous endimiyans
About 37 tribes live in the Patarian isles, and stranegly enough, the inhabitants, the Patarii make up the most of my worlds population thanks to the technological innovations of the Caladochii and the Adanii.
The second most populous are humans, of course
Ja-Relly, a species of sentient bacteria that embodies heavy alloy metal suits for outer world exploration of their seas or ocean ships, or maybe the Krell, a species of hyper active and aggressive insect pods with metallic exoskeletons and void ships that infect worlds with their eggs and offspring. But I’d say Krell for sure
On earth? Still humans. Throughout the galaxy? The Mantoids. A utopian society and plentiful resources have allowed their population to boom into the quadrillions.
Kobolds. They have no nation of their own, instead working out a sort of symbiotic relationship within other cultures and races. They also do wonderfully at plundering Yesterfolk ruins, due to small size and a knack for tinkering, which is how they usually originally get accepted by non-kobolds.
Probably the Xarans (basically a half-elf, half human hybrid); originally only possible through magic due to the species disparity, Xarans are capable of having children with other xarans and are thus self sustaining.
Kogons, a hybrid race between dragons and kobolds. In the world of Kobalera I've been working mostly offline by this point, there's 3 races. The kogons are actually fertile and can reproduce with each other. The Kobalera civilization has a population of 18,334,700,000. Of that, 18,274,500,000 are kogons, 99.67% of the population. Kobolds make up a mere 53,900,000 of the population, and dragons only 6,300,000, mainly due to their high resource demand, long lifespan, and slow reproductive cycle.
Medians, or "True Terrans". They would normally be referred to as demons by humanity, but they arent as well known or documented in "the real world" for humans to understand them.
They exist in a parallel dimension named Terra, similar to earth but in a more 'infinite scale'. It was created first by the higher beings as a trial before making "Terra II" (My worlds "Earth") and humanity.
They don't have the functional organs required to reproduce, but have humanoid bodies that model them. They are practically ageless, and the only way more of their species can be created is by a wellspring that absorbs sentience from other dimentions in the center of creation and converts that into new souls of these Medians.
They grow like any other living being, but once they reach adulthood they stop ageing (around the visual age of 40)
Due to this and their eternal longevity, they are forced to host constant genocides on the population. Not in a malicious intent though, instead as a more ritualistic passing, and only done to volunteers and/or the eldest of the species.
To keep legacies alive, their knowledge is kept in a bottomless library, each book within a life story of each Median that has passed since the creation of their dimension.
Probably the orcs or the halflings. Despite them being slave races they are still quite skilled in specific crafts so they are formidable. But if you manage to find a group of them that are not bound into slavery they will be the strongest fighters in the world except for one nomadic dwarf tribe that’s lived for nearly 20000 years without a single death.
Slimes
They can be found literally everywhere and I MEAN everywhere deserts, snowy mountains, volcanic regions, acidic terrains, cities, etc. Due to their adaptability, a small population can form and once that's done there's no going back and trust me. people. have. tried.
If we're not counting the xenomorphs, then it'd be the Nij hands down. Roughly(getting precise numbers is a very trying task when you're spread across a decent chunk of a galaxy) 5.2 trillion of them. The Civonians are up next, roughly 870 billion.
If we count xenomorphs, they win. There are entire planets infested with them with estimated populations in the trillions.
That's a hard question..... There's likely three possible candidates in terms of sapient species - else it would likely be ants or some other bug.
First are the Elves, they are one of oldest, if not the oldest races in my world. As such, they've had the most time to reproduce and grow as a species, even if children are generally rarer for them for various reasons. some of the elven factions are stereotypical, with drastically low birthrates, while others have significantly higher birthrates, though gestation for pure elven children is longer than that of humans or half-elves of various other species.
Second are the humans, which unlike the Elves have quicker gestation periods and an easier time procreating. They have been able to carve out a decent amount of land for themselves as well.... And so they have been able to grow their population quickly. They have a higher mortality than elves, but they are easily replaced with other humans, so that is why I believe that they could be a contender.
Last, and certainly not least, are the "deathlings" massive and pale humanoids who have very quickly gestation periods and time to maturity (not sure about the exact numbers yet, but something akin to 5ish years). This is very limited though as they fight all other races and each other, to the point of being seen as non-sentient animals with the capacity for basic language by some.
Of the three, my gut tells me that humans have the highest population, then the deathlings, then the elves, though again, I'm not wholly sure.
I would say orcs because they have a whole thing where the weakest of their race is constantly being pumped out as cannon fodder.
I took the whole “orcs are built for war” thing and gave them a racial reason to kill each other.
I’ll reply why if anyone wants to know.
Mostly humans, elf’s are plentiful but doesn’t breed very often (since most live in a town surrounded my a dome which stops time, making then basically invincible). Half of the dwarfs were either slaved by those pesky goblinoids of Gondebar or slain by them during the fall of Königreich.
Humans have the highest population overall because they tend to be created the most often across multiple planets. This is because humans appear on the Universal Blueprint, a set of universal knowledge of complex things that planetsouls use to create life on their home planet. For context, planetsouls are immensely powerful magical beings in my world responsible for creating life on their home planet via their immense magic. The Universal Blueprint gives the planetsouls the knowledge to not only create humans, but also modify humans to create humanoid species, or create magic that humans can use to make their lives more interesting and/or exciting.
On any individual planet, most species don't have a significantly larger population compared to others, with the sole exception of humans. Non-human species can only be created by a single planetsoul outside of some rare exceptions, but humans can easily be created by multiple planetsouls due to the Universal Blueprint, so if multiple planetsouls create humans on a single planet then humans have an overwhelming majority.
Humans. With lots of mixing as per fantasy fashion-
Made the most sense. They don't have any peculiar feature (aren't monotone). Only endurance, versatility, community (...ish), and the will to learn.
Pure numbers goes to humans (for sentient species not like an algae or something) . As a jack of trades generalist species they are going to be one of the top three common races in any given neich/area. Orcs dominate the planes and Savanah, but humans put up settlements there with a quarter of the population fortifying little dots on the map. The bird folk dominating the mountain ranges still have settlements of humans on plateaus and hidden forts in crags guarding routes. The dwarves dominate the cities below, but at every major exit known lay a trading hub looking to be the first point of contact of those quality goods. Even an icy tundra with carnivorous beast men will contend with some hunters wrapped tightly in layers of furs like a mockery of the gifts humans lack.
We are rarely the best suited for a given enviroment, but we can make due good enough just about everywhere.
I think IRL it's ants? So ants in my world, too.
But if we're talking sapient creatures, then it's humans. Everything else is low in numbers by comparison, unless you count demons/ghosts, but they're just the spirits of dead humans. They're more numerous than humans, though.
If the human population is a bit over 8 billion total (a bit more if you count the absolute madlads who establish colonies for living humans in the Empyrean and Infernal realms, but still well under 9bi), then demons are like almost as much in total and each of them is more mentally unstable and dangerous than a human (literally tortured souls from Hell lol), whereas ghosts are much less numerous than humans, but add them all together (especially the ghosts being housed in Empyrean regions like the Garden of Eden, the Pure Lands, Valhalla etc), add the demons and the dead overall surpass the living in number.
The only reason why the dead don't vastly outnumber the living is bc most people just reincarnate.
**If we're just talking about sentients**, there are only good censuses of humans (and only in certain countries) and the Urbesi. Humans are much more numerous; the civilized world of the Etciv plus Toyeri west of the Great wall have a total population of 550 million give or take. The three known Urbesi kingdoms have populations of about 150 million combined.
This is "author knowledge" but the most numerous sentients are Utok, a hive-mind insectoid species, although whether any one individual worker/soldier/drone counts as sentient is something of a philosophical question. They've been eradicated from most of the continents but there remains a sizable population on the Southwestern continent - the Utok aare uninterested in the sub-equatorial rainforests where the local humans live, and those humans have no interest in the arid plains. Because they many are extremely short-lived, the populations vary wildly, but peak summertime population tops a billion.
After that, humans, the collective humanoids generally labelled "orcs" or "goblins" by humans based on their size (although they are a number of different species, with relatively little interbreeding - individually it's not clear if any of them total as many as the Urbesi), then Urbesi, then the true Dragons, and then a small number of sentient monsters which were either magically created or developed sentience on their own after an exceptionally long life.
**If you're not limiting it to sentients**, then it's not much different from earth until you get to large vertebrates. The lesser drakes (non-tetrapod terrestrial vertebrates with 4 legs and separate wings or flippers, of which dragons are the apex species) are very numerous and have been native to the world longer than tetrapods, and as such they come in a huge number of sizes.
Technically an unintelligent radiotrophic fungus that has spread to multiple habitable realms. Their mycelium networks are used as a way to hold stellar dust together and repair impact craters on the stationary outer shells of biomechanical habitats (a product of advanced techno-sorcery) thanks to a very robust glomalin production system. The combination of high intensity radiation that is omnipresent in the void between shards, and is given off by shards themselves, and the excessive waste heat produced by the habitats creates the perfect environment for them to thrive. They've also accidentally, and intentionally, been introduced to countless spherical bodies. All such bodies are hollow collections of debris packed into a tight bauble around a sleeping god, specifically a Deirex class Megadeus. Matter is drawn to the Deirex's charisma but the disdain of such a Megadeus for all things material repels it, creating an equilibrium of sorts. The inner face of such a bauble is illuminated by the sheer presence of a Deirex, often allowing mortal life to flourish, especially the aforementioned fungi. If such a bauble is the correct distance from a shard, it can also be covered in the fungi, even if it lacks the proper atmosphere and other elements to support a more complex ecosystem. They've even found homes inside the hollowed vessels of various active deities, much to their displeasure. However the abyss beneath the shards, an ocean of roiling pitch kept at bay by the pressure of a given beacon, is completely uninhabitable. It is antithetical to all existence, filled with countless, dimly glowing, hungry and lifeless "eyes" that seek to devour everything. Even the gods, and the less pious dead, fear it. The universe is also a god, an Endodeus specifically, but she's decaying and being ravaged by scavenging Exodeus after an accident caused lethal injuries and introduced foreign contaminates. The mortals and various gods living inside her are said contaminates and are experiencing reality gradually rotting around them, with entire massive expanses of it occasionally being ripped away while also falling down through her flesh and blood. Imagine slipping into a black hole while "above" you spacetime is eaten away by hordes of higher-dimensional phages, vermin, and worse. Some of the gods are waging war against the things trying to eat the universe, others are trying to keep the universe's defenses from consuming them, others sustain its organs through various means to try and buy more time, and some have also tried to get her to produce new infant universes they can escape into, and much to their frustration the fungi has found its way even there.
It's even taken root in the celestial factories that reincarnate mortal souls.
Wisps, although their level of sentience varies wildly.
Essentially, when a wisp comes to a decision point, it makes both decisions.
But since they're tiny little mostly transparent floaty creatures 99% of the time, nobody really notices the difference between there being 30 Wisps in an area and 40, because a couple of them had to make a decision about something.
The problem is this process is fantastic for making new wisps, but absolutely terrible for their sentience since what's actually happening is the old wisp dies and explodes into two baby wisps.
They can refuse to split up, and if they do this long enough, they eventually gain proper sentience and some interesting abilities.
But the barely sentient wisps don't actually have a reason to refuse their instincts and aren't really intelligent enough to understand what dying means until they've already refused a couple of times.
So it's entirely a matter of perspective whether or not wisps are actually the most or least numerous sentient race.
Because there's nothing genetically separating the Wisps that live a couple of days and then explode into two more from the ones that live for centuries and become magical behemoths.
Generally, people consider the long-lived ones to be some variation of a different thing. Either as a magical version of the same race, as the Superior breed, or as the luckiest.
Regardless of the explanation, the only group that doesn't separate the Wisps into different categories is the Wisps themselves.
This is because whether they're 5 minutes or 5,000 years old, a wisps instinct when coming up on a decision point is to split into two new wisps. Unfortunately, the Wisps have conclusively proven that the age of the parent has no effect on the chance of The Offspring attaining true sentience.
Interestingly, wisps are the only known species to have entirely avoided the concept of a patron deity due to this process.
While belief in patron deities varies wildly, most wisps upon learning of the concept conclude that their creation must have been due to random chance. Because if they were intentionally created, then the responsible being could be called nothing less than a devil.
That's not to say, however, that wisps avoid God's entirely. In fact, most wisps offer at least occasional patronage to this or that God of gambling or chance. This does however, cause the occasional issue, as sobriety is considered the greatest of Virtues among wisps, and pantheons of the other races have an unfortunate tendency to put gambling and intoxication into a single deity. A concept entirely foreign and bizarre to wisp culture.
In my sci-fi world that title would belong to the Chitatik. They're a vacuum living insectoid species, heavier than a human while being somewhat shorter and bulkier. They've basically monopolized fast intragalactic travel due to a hive system that effectively makes portals everywhere. Combining that with them being one of the oldest species has meant they've proliferated everywhere that has been explored, often done by setting up hives in large asteroids or small planetoids. Theres a running joke that if you fly close to an asteroid for more than 2 minutes you'll have to pull over to scrape off the viewports... which is obviously fake because if you hit one you'd probably have to fix the viewport. The little buggers are tough!
Rough numbers are difficult to get accurately but the low estimates are well over a quadrillion
Vulren (fox folk) have the highest population in my world, since they have the second highest birth rate in the world. The species with the highest reproduction rate has had large portions of its population decimated by war.
Dilosians, large Crocodile-like men native to the swamp and jungle nation of Dilosia, although a majority of them stay in their homeland, with large groups of them venturing to the other continents only recently. In the western nations, it's a close tie between Elves and Humans being the majority.
Teramids, a eusocial ant-like alien species has the highest population of all Sophonts in the known universe. Compared to the roughly 120 billion humans in existence, Teramid populations sit at an estimated 3.5 trillion individuals.
In the eight kingdoms that make up the Seven Civilized Kingdoms, Humans. They make up approximately 25% of the population of the Known World. If you include all three of the subspecies (Carnites, Southerners, Amazonians) who have their own kingdoms, it's closer to 60%. Elves are next at 18%, Fae at 12%, Ainuu at 6% and Others (Beastmen, Wildlings, etc.) make up the remaining 4%.
In normal spacetime, rhummah (sapient primates) narrowly outnumber suvai (sapient therapods), but when considering magical-axis dimensions, ngeywiin (sapient magic-natives) outnumber both, although the measure of their population can vary wildly as there are multiple ways to define an "individual" ngeywiin person.
Most of humans and animals, probably tens of millions. Dwarves, werewolves and dragons still grow almost high in some cities, towns and villages with each different and unique architecture. I don't tell my favorite spoilers of my world I built and created over the years, although recent revisions and some improvaments I made.
Humans, by far. Other races species only in relatively small pockets across the world. This is because races are created when a local spirit, called a Low God, that is worshiped by local humans modifies their genetics in some way.
Humans in my world are both figuratively and literally the "base race" of my world. The human population is slightly lower compared to our world.
For every 300 humans you can expect a Wraith. Wraiths are dead humans still bound to this world by pact, force, fate etc. Usually a part of a Wraiths body resembles its own corpse while the other part is filled out by thick purple mist. They sometimes gain other physical traits like horns or tails further resembling their soul.
Then there are Hextouched. They are technically humans mutated by magic. Their population varies highly and is solely dependent on the amount of magic in the area. Their mutation mostly let them grow body parts of animals (antlers, tusks, tails etc.) or additional body parts to those they already have.
Enlighteneds are extremely rare. There is only one for every 1 000 000 people and most of them don't even roam earth. The souls of hmans who have sworn loyalty to the gods may one day become one of them (or part of them...) and their appearance may be anything. Be not afraid!
Oh and I think dragons should also be counted as a race since they also have their own culture. They mostly populate areas untouched or forsaken by other races. Their intelligence depends on how close they are linked to their source of magic and their population depends on that. Less intelligent dragons feel the need to reproduce and in turn are way more common with there being one for every 100 000 humans. For intelligent dragons that ratio is 1 for every 2 500 000 Humans
Hextouched and Wraiths are technically also still human enough to be counted as such.
I actually have a nice reference for this in my head, which is hardly ever used and just exists. If you took every single being In the known galaxy and compressed them into twenty people, you would have:
Nine machine people, thanks in no small part to the fact that pretty much every machine more complicated than an assembly arm has its own full-fledged consciousness and identity.
Five baseline humans.
Two pawkin.
Two hadeans.
One arthropodite.
And one amalgamated blob that makes up all of the theoretical, undiscovered humanlike genomes out on the fringe worlds.
Gnomes, it is a joke on 'cheaper by the dozen' in my story. Where the gnomes used a 26 letter alphabet to communicate in code during a gnome uprising several generations ago. The couples in the race often raise large families trying to get a name for all 26 letters.
Also gnomes have a higher rate of multiple births in my world. Twins and triplets are common with the record being Decuplets much like a long time record holder in the GWR.
Most of the gnomes are constrained on one continent where they are ruled over by noble dwarfs.
Never really thought about this. I suppose it’s either the Dorffen, who’re the only industrialised species and live in a teslapunk communo-monarchist (yes you heard right) society, or the Yelayla, who have the largest and most fertile continent almost entirely to themselves but only have Napoleonic technology.
Kobolds. They are my worlds equivalent of goblins in terms of low power horde creatures that cover most of the plane. Definitely #1 in population, but the general rule is 1 skilled magic user = 1,000 kobolds. (Magic is very powerful and present in my world, and magic shields, super speed, and regeneration have turned most of my magic users called ‘Apostles’ into superheroes).
Insects in general. There are quintillions of them, even some giant (6 foot) ones called “Stingers” (among other mutant animals, such as “Runners”, “Crawlers”, “Biters”, “Slithers”, “Choppers”, “Stompers”, “Fliers”, and “Hunters”). Insects are everywhere.
Hmmmm for my world I'd have to go with goblins because of their racial ability that pretty much allows them to reproduce with ANY species, whether living, dead or artificial andddd to have their offspring inherit traits from the non goblin parent(this only stacks to the 3rd generation, the 4th generation would be normal goblins then the next set of normies would be the 8th generation).
The Ork is found everywhere, it's species comes from spores, so even if you kill every ork, there is a chance Orks can reappear. Ork spores create an Ork ecosystem. First fungi plant orkoids, vermin orkoids, beast orkoids, slave goblins, and finally, proper Orks. Sages claim they are from a brutal realm where there is only war.
Necromancy is used to kill Ork Spores, but can leave land fallow or barren. To the point that Undead/golems are let loose to guard against further Ork spread.
The only saving grace to Orkoids is that their forms are edible when properly prepared. The other races in retaliation for the Orks eating other races, they are turned to food in turn.
I would assume some bug or bacteria or something but just looking at the species I’ve actually put effort into plus humans, probably cadrans.
They got into space and started colonizing it first so they had a head start and have author bias but once the troodons and humans have fully integrated into the space culture and give it a few hundred or thousand years and they probably all even out. The troodons and humans did start with larger planets so they have an advantage there.
The arberos. They are tree people who eventually turn into actual trees in old age. The arbero Forrest is the largest forest in the world and is filled with incoherent whispers. Many massacre fires have been lit to make room for the next generation, though many wars have been fought to avenge their recently burned ancestors.
Depends on how you’d measure it.
- numbers on the ground? Its probably one of the insects
- Biomass? The magical krill-like species that lives in the ocean. This species is kind of the core of the entire oceanic ecosystem
- but between the intelligent species? Its humans. While they’re outnumbered in the home regions of other intelligent species they are unique in their ability to use both types of magic. This allows them to spread to a wider variety of enviroments and thus maintain a higher sustainable population
After the humans its probably elves (who are very closely behind in terms of numbers even though there’s very few on the main continent. But its debetable if these other elves are even the same species), then dwarfs who were equal to humans in the past but after the war only survived in the most defensible places (such as mountains), and then the inellligent species which don’t really have societies that scale up to this level like the traveling orcs or technophobic goblins
Humans, Alilloi (elves/fae) are more K-selected, and Corroi (dwarves?) are also K-selected but less so and tend to be polygamous with higher ranking males hoarding most of the females, meaning most males don’t have children and less women have a multitude of children because a given male will likely have a couple favorites who end up with the most children.
Probably humans, though Razorwing Harpies & Kobolds could give them a run for their money.
All three are good at building population, but the Harpies & Kobolds aren't as good as humans at keeping the population steady. (By which I mean that Harpies tend to do rather reckless things to show off for their prospective partners & Kobold engineering is on the "explodey" side.)
My world has 6 realms, but in the main realm, Medireg its humans as they were one of the 3 races originally there and gained control of most the realms main land pretty quickly. There's 2 other normal realms, one underground, which is mostly just the dwarves and the other is up in the sky, and that's probably mostly harpies, but the main civilised race is elves. The other 3 realms are ascendant realms, and they are home to basically the last surviving beasts from the end or the previous universe. So their mainly the dead souls captured by the 3, which are turned into separate different races. There's just too much for me to say what their top populated race is.
My story takes place as a sort of non-linear multi-verse where some people have the ability to travel between different space times. Inside of linear time, it really depends on the time/place but most of the beings who can travel inter-dimensionally are humans. This is due to some extenuating circumstances between the verses’ “gods”, some humans, and artifacts beyond even these gods knowledge and purview.
Nightkin. They tend to breed like rabbits, have one to six male to female ratio, tend to experience easy pregnancies, have minimum mandated amount of children every single one of them supposed to have, live practically everywhere (if you live in a city of any note there is nightkin colony under it) and remain fertile for majority of their long lifespans. They also can interbreed with several other species in very human like manner, except they never ever produce halfbreeds. Every child of mixed marriage would be pureblooded nightkin.
Slimes. no contest. They're literally everywhere, no matter the type of environment. From the deepest part of the ocean, volcanic area, the freezing poles, and even the stratospheres, there's always some species of slimes making their home there.
When the super is flat
Terraria moment
Slimes are the best
The volt (short for voltaics) are the ancestors of those humans that did not escape to the safety of the vestibules when the Annex began their terraforming of earth, one of the nanite "plagues" they released began forcibly transforming plants, animals, and people into bio-tech monstrosities, the volt were the only new species created by these nanites to maintain their human intelligence. They now have photovoltaic skin and can survive solely on sunlight. After many years on the surface without seeing "normal" humans and afterwards having many negative interactions with them when they did reappear the volt are largely aggressive towards humans, not really knowing that they are humans due to the specialized suits they must now wear to survive on the surface. These suits are associated with danger and an enemy by the volt but also as a source of incredible valuable technology.
That actually seems sick, way more detailed then any of my creatures
I misread that as Voltaires and wondered who the hell wanted a whole race made up of Voltaire
woah
Are you saying that volt are the same people from back then, transformed and with immortal/long lifespans, or are the volt an offshoot of humanity? If I saw a volt I was related to, would I be seeing my great (×N) grandpa, or my (Nth) cousin?
Being largely technological beings and living off of sunlight yes, there are many volt that are still alive from back then. They are capable of reproducing but do so quite slowly as the nanites altered much of their biology and anatomy. But there are still tens of thousands of volt from the beginning.
But they formed a society, or are they so few compared to what human population once was that they cannot form anything substantial? I think it would be interesting as hell exploring this sort of "self-imposed" loneliness that could come from their negative relation with humans.
Humans, like cockroaches, and worse, hybridize the most. You blink and they try to set up another empire. The only species that was close are the ratfolk, and they managed to get themselves nearly wiped out.
Ratfolk? Fascinating. What did they do to themselves to almost wipe them out?
They probably tried to live near humans lmao.
Or humans decided to live near them.
Multiple things First started a genocidal war against everyone, lost and lived in isolation, constantly trying wars and get their heads bashed in. Then a few centuries later stole a dragon hatchling
>Stole a dragon hatchling And this folks is how charred skeever becomes a popular food.
Pretty much how it went ;) That dragon still twitches a bit seeing ratlings, even those under her protection.
Does the existence of the ratfolk mean that humans, you know, had to do the thing with rats? WHY?
Nope, humans are the odd one out in my world >!But some humans definitely definitely did the deed with some of them anyways!<
Humans as well in mine. To the point that the the last great elven empire is trying to commit genocide against the humans out of fear more than anything. “In 3 generations we watched humans go from nomadic tribes to building cities to rival our own. In 2 more generations those cities United into empires that rivaled our own and they outnumber us 3 to 1. Imagine what kind of position we’ll be in 2 more generations from now”
My High Elves claimed such too. Now there aren't that many left, and their territory has even more shortlived species living there. But then they've claimed anyone else should just submit to them.
Skaven moment
Humans. They're the only humanoid organisms left. If we include animals it would be insects if we're being realistic.
Likely ants in particular. On Earth IRL they outweigh all wild animals and birds combined and approach 1/5 of total human biomass.
They also constantly wage war with each other. Develop massive supercolonies that span continents, some species engage in purely raiding, others farm, some even maintain livestock. There is another one that kidnaps ant children and enslaves them. I used ants as the basis of the Formancai in my world, a massive ant society that outnumbers everyone. It’s simultaneously the least unified society and the most.
Teriatians are space bunnies you can probably guess why they have the biggest population
Access to a large amount of cigarettes?
?
They fuck like rabbits?
yes
[удалено]
more like space bunnies=bunnies
If we’re talking about sentient races, that would go to the Morforwyn. Merfolk who appear more fish-like than a human-fish hybrid. They lay about over 1,000 eggs, though usually only about 100 or so hatch and only about 30 manage to live to adulthood. If we’re talking about species as a whole, then it’s a tie between Trolls and Carpuna. Trolls are a Macro Virus in my world (Macro as in tall as two full grown men), and they inject their genetic makeup into their hosts body where it infects their cells and causes these cells to start making a Trollyp, and if the host doesn’t have the right organs to hold the Trollyp, the infected cells will infect an organ and turn that organ into a uterus. The Organ in question is usually one of the Livers or the Appendix, and in rare cases a cancer cell or the bladder. And since Trolls don’t require the host to be male, female, young, old, or even the same species, they grow fast. Carpuna are a fish that evolved to be eaten, they evolved bioluminescence to attract predators and are willing to get in the way of a predator just to be eaten, they’re even known to actively throw themselves on spears and tridents, and even beach themselves only when predators are around. And despite being suicidal animals, they still have one of the largest populations, since they lay near indestructible eggs, and one Carpuna can lay over 1,000,000,000,000 eggs and about 98% of those eggs will hatch and make it to adulthood, and the only reason they make it to adulthood is because they reach it after being 1 hour old, and by that hour, any female Carpuna will be getting ready to lay more eggs. Only reason they don’t overpopulate, other than the mass suicide, is that the eggs hatch after 1 year, by that time, about 20% of the previous Carpuna population would be dead.
So, uh, why are Carpuna so suicidal? Is there an evolutionary advantage?
It’s unknown as to why they evolved their suicidal tendencies, as there seems to be no good reason for it.
spreading indestructible eggs, maybe
Eumans, another breed of humans that outnumbered humans and violently took over Earth. The remaining humans are hunted by Euman soldiers.
What is the difference between Eumans and Humans?
The E, duh.
😆
🤣
hahaha 🤣
Now I know it’s not my world, but it would make for a really cool story if the only difference between them was something small and really hard to distinguish. If that were in an urban environment you could have a really cool game of cat and mouse with the humans and the Euman soldiers. But also the E.
Carl Sagan
Eumans have more developed brains and better reflexes. They also have lighter skin pigmentation (not a reference to race, just aesthetic). They also are more durable and can survive harsher conditions, as they are basically more evolved humans.
Oh, boy. >They also have lighter skin pigmentation (not a reference to race, just aesthetic). Dude, just take that out. That's like naming a race the n-word and saying "it isn't a reference to race, I just like how it sounds". Worldbuilding isn't done in a vacuum.
Sorry this is my first in depth world I created
Nah, man. Sorry, I came off too harsh too. Shit happens. It's just an unfortunate mistake lol.
I am guessing you mean Albino type of skin? If that is the case I think you can leave that in tbh
I assume it's in reference to like Pale skin, like the species from dune two. All races can have albino people.
Ye, gonna be honest, if the whole skin pigmentation is just aesthetic, you may just be better off taking that out Maybe instead of them just being lighter, you could have them be in stronger colors, like really really dark brown or like neon blue (but not glowing) Eyes and hair would also be a way to make them visually distinct without triggering people’s racism alarms. Or you could make racism a huge thing in your world too.
Nah the aesthetic rules. Source: Ridley Scott Engineers
So their just better, Whiter humans? Even if that's not the intention, I feel like you're setting yourself up for failure with that whole skin pigmentation thing.
I'm imagining less pink and more Alien Prometheus marble white, but that's just me. The Engineers didn't come across racist to me, and they're literally bigger, better, whiter "humans"
Ooooh. I thought it was more like translucent skin than color. Yeah I don't wanna be the one to say the quiet part out loud buuut it seems a bit too "Master-Racey" I'd do clearer skin for sure. More visible veins, slightly more reddish/pinkish depending on gender, how translucent they are, maybe the more translucent ones are weaker/stronger. ("Defective") Perhaps? But that might go down the whole "eugenics" thing...
ghosts, since the world is just the after life. but there a lot of ghost cats around
if cats have nine lifes does each cat get nine ghosts
this is actually so good lmaoo
humans
Depends on the time, humans normally have the highest mortals at their peak, but humans being humans do something to cause them to o nearly extinct, from fighting other mortal races to even nearly wiping themselves out completely, humans are a bunch that repopulate at a rate that puts rabbits to shame
Huh… well my world is full of anthropomorphic animal people… just a sec… *(one Google search later)* So rats are the most numerous mammalian animals (7 billion) and chickens are the most numerous birds (30 billion). I tried to find results for reptiles and amphibians, but it wasn’t quite as explicit. I think it said frogs / toads were the biggest family of amphibians. Though chickens probably wouldn’t be as common in a world where there are no humans raising them and moving them around. Rats either actually. But I think that’s a good answer. Rats, chickens, and frog / toad anthros can be the most numerous of the animal people.
Level 1 enemies then. I wonder how prevalent boars are in a RPG universe.
No joke it’s beans. It’s magical human sized sentient beans.
May I request an origin story and cultural context for said sentient beans in your campaign?
My world is called Beanquest it takes place in a world where humanity already on the brink of all out nuclear war suddenly gains access to magic and like immediately enchanted the nukes so when nuclear war did break out the effects were even worse. Eventually after humans died out, radiation mixed with raw magical energy leaked into a seed vault and a kidney bean sprout absorbed a lot of it. causing the bean that grew from said sprout to be a literal all powerful sentient god that brought the rest of the beans to life. Now pretty much all of Europe, which is the kidney beans domain is inhabited by beans.
This is incredible. Can your player characters be beans?
Yes actually for the first campaign of Beanquest which I’m still in progress of making the player characters are only allowed to beans but there are so many different types. There liverbeans they are direct descendants of the kidney bean and are minor demigods, capable of short range telekinesis, aqua beans that instead of hands have large crab like claws and also get several buffs when underwater, there’s Shadow beans that actually evolved from jellybeans and are incredibly capable in dark magic. The list goes on.
I can't even express how enthused I am by this. If you're in need of any playtesting at all, please let me know. I blog solo actual plays and would love to try this out whenever it's ready! Edit: To be clear, would happily pay to try a Beanquest RPG
With guns?
Humans by a longshot, if we're talking sapient races. At least, among the human world...
In terms of macroscopic organisms, like real life, it's ants. At least for animals. Probably.
With all species combined, technically it'd be elves (every species of them), followed by humans (dwarves in my world are a species of human, so they're lumped in here with humans), tied with orcs, and so on (I'm sorry, there's just so many species in my world). You should've said SAPIENT species, though. As individual species, each species of elf barely even surpasses the population of beast races, and the most populous species of elf hardly even comes close to the population of goblins. I can't go into good detail or give exact numbers.
Haas, the adaptive rabbity style of Lamarckian evolvers who make themselves into whatever works for the environment. Guys are basically everywhere and outnumber humans probably 10 000 to 1
Imagine an alien species of fly like aliens, their quantity so massive that their world is completely engulfed by them, and all other natural resources consumed entirely. Of course, science would be curious about such a place, so the few settlements spread around this planet are protected by an emancipation grid, but the sound of bugs getting zapped 24/7 isn’t exactly ideal.
There’s species in your world ? I thought we just did rocks and plants……
The answer in every world… insects
For umbrella terms, it would be Fae or The Nih(Various Asian Mythos yokai, Oni, and the like). For non umbrella terms, it would be Slimes from the 3 Slimes who gained Eldritch level powers to the weakest would be over 500 Nonnillion or more.
Ogres, though In my world they are more civilized than the stereotypical ogres. Having kingdoms and the like
Anthros that call themselves humans. Though, I can't say what individual species is the most common. Of my existing characters it's probably canids and if it's not, then it's otters.
Daemons. Normally they’re basically psychic bacterial mold, so there are millions of them floating around any given person’s head gobbling up the emotional energy they release. If too many gather in one spot it gets to be a problem and they might form a visible macroscopic body, but that’s relatively rare.
Romero's a type of zombie in my story I'm writing. In my world scientist ran an experiment between dec 23 1969 and Jan 8 1970 that successfully reanimated a deceased individual. Though unlike most stories, the individual "Frank Nowak" retained all of his previous self and was considered the first member of a sub species of human called the returned. But later in 2003 after thousands of people brought back the first "Romero" appeared and caused a major zombie outbreak in the eastern US. It took 6 weeks most of the us east of the Mississippi to be infected. It took 3 months for the western hemisphere and 4 months after that most of the world. The main reason the world fell within a year was that you didn't need to be bit just had to get infected cells into your body. So as of the story now Romero's are about 5.6 bil to 781 mil humans.
If it's anything like IRL the answer is probably ants for just about any setting, if we're going by just the number of individuals. Ants are kicking ass in this regard. In terms of biomass (total mass of all individuals), it's probably some kind of crab. Arthropods are just OP.
Humans but mostly just because they interbreed with just about every other race, half human still counts as human right?
Big, strong fluffy, chronically underdressed lion people! Followed by leopard people and other assorted big cats.
Username checks out.
Fiction beings rapidly populate the word because any idea for a character can become one. Despite their numbers and superior abilities they are still all slaves to humanity due to their nature of being just ideas brought to life.
I have no clue. There are many species (tigers, lions, wolves foxes, dholes, otters, polecats, bears, panthers, leopards, birds of prey, etc) and numbers for each are uncertain, and with all the wars, you can't just go and ask for population statistics. There are many unaccounted for. This is just one region. Populations could be completely different on different parts of the planet. Humans didn't exist in the region for thousands of years until they arrived a few centuries prior. Lapis_Wolf
Of the sapient beings its neck and neck between the Darklings and humans. Both breed like rabbits and have fairly short lifespans. But of all the creatures the nematodes still rain supreme in terms of population. There are around 57 billion nematodes per human on earth and climbing.
In my nobledark fantasy world? Mixed human/aleqoto, followed by Humans, followed by the Aleqoto, followed by human/jueqani, then followed by the other assorted races created by the Jueqani, then by the Jueqani themselves In my desert punk sci fi world? The yet unnamed four armed guys, followed by the yet unnamed human equivalents - the reverse is true if we’re speaking for the solar system as a whole, rather than just the one world which I’ve yet to name(this is a relatively new project). There’s an extinct ancient species, and another which is more like a living psychic virus that manipulates organic and semi organic matter, and all but the most primitive technology.
Humans, Undeads next, Beastpeople next
Demons drastically outnumber humans, having killed most of them off during The Fall.
Nobody knows but it is probally either Karartans, star covering organic satelites that create matryoshka brains, or Yumuris, cannibal frogs :d Both species cover large parts of the galaxy, so much that yumuri horde created a culture named "Refugees". Whic is a wave of nomads advancing ahead of it, formed by other species and civilizations escaping the advance of the Yumuris. They tour the galaxy, chasing each other, just like the hour and minute hands of a clock. If the Karartans had not conquered humanity first, humans would have gone extinct or joined the refugees because of yumuri threat Yumuris look like this https://www.reddit.com/r/worldjerking/s/OrJydnXncI
The Ki'Yek... small flying aliens. quick generations, no concept of birth control and recent acsess to space infrastructure means they're doing *pretty well* on the galactic census. they're like the size of a groundhog and apperently disinterested in empire though, so nobody's really worried. you'll find them basically everywhere, hocking their talents as freelance farmers, craftspeople and linguists.
Orcs. Counting all of Aquaria, there are around 600 million orcs just in the "civilized world", aka sovereign states, not counting secluded tribes and communities. Goblins are the runner-up with around 577 million individuals around. Humans are only around 140 million, concentrating mostly inside the United Empire. Elves are about 110 million.
The Quantadons are a extraterrestrial species that populate the darkest corners of the universe, probably over a thousand septillions of them across the space. If we’re going for a single world, then there are the Kahlls, a fish people who out populated their planet, and many have moved to different worlds as a result. Their original world has up to 26 billion Kahlls residing in it.
Humans followed by succubi. Unless you only count purebloods, at which point it would probably be elves. They rarely have children outside their race, and when they do the children are almost always ostracized. So maybe you will find the descendants of an elf, but elf/other race couples are extremely rare. A few noble families do it because half-elves can age more quickly, and therefore join society as adults faster. "My 23 year old son will become an adult and get a real job in two years" doesn't go over well with majority human nobles, as humans are adults at 15, and elves at 25. So many of them just assume you are babying your kids in their low 20, even if it is the same as them not expecting a 13 or 14 year old to get a job
Probably tied between Humans and Vespids. Of the four Elder Races (the four mortal races that have been around the longest) humans have the advantage. The Fey don’t really reproduce anymore after they “ascended”, the Slyth don’t exist anymore, and the Giants reproduce extremely slowly and have low numbers to begin with. Humans reproduce at an average rate (1-2 kids per year on average), they live a decently long life span (50-60 years at least), and they’ve been around for a long time. The Vespids on the other hand reproduce exceptionally quickly (anywhere from 100 to 2,000 eggs per cycle), balanced out by their short life spans (20 years at most). Despite being a relatively new race, they’ve already established several “superhives”, and are thought to be on equal standing with the humans population wise.
Elves and other sylvan beings. It's a take on the Feywild setting.
Humans. Seconded by gnomes
Humans. They fuck everything that walks
Slimes industrialized their reproduction so there are trillions of them, which is balanced with most of them comitting suicide after living just one year. This population explosion happened in two decades, and it's one of the ways slimes have shocked most societies into a drawn out collapse.
Shadelings, they have the largest continent and breed the quickest.
If we go by individual species, humans are definitely the most populous. But if you group all faun races together, from minotaurs to satyrs to pegtauri (pegasus centaurs) to merfolk to werewolves to keynomi (anime-esque animal folk), then they would be a close second if not beat humans out for first place. But since they are so divided throughout the world, have many races within the group hidden and basically unknown to the wider world, and only have that they have animal traits to unite them, the vast majority of people don't count it nor actually group them like that. The term faun isn't even a common term in-world and most that use it don't mean it well.
Humans, because humans are the invariable result of interbreeding between other species. All humans are basically true-breeding mongrels from elves, orcs, dwarves, halflings, and so on, which is why they're roughly middle-of-the-road in terms of characteristics.
Humans! second to them is the magical people (mages and witches mostly) but they're humans with powers I suppose and longer longevity.
the olcen a oceanic fish like race that has existed for near millennia
Afflicted human variants that have the characteristics of ants. They live underground and once they get an additional boost of mutation following a massive magical battle, they emerge and attempt to take over the world. Yes Iiked hunterxhunter. I also just love ants
It's currently a tie between humans and Elves.
Humans, next probably Martians and then Silicon people
Intelligent species would probably be the Beastlings, created originally from dragons doing dragon things. But out of any biological and mechanical species it would probably be dragons and other draconics. Out of all forms of life including auroric and particulate life would probably be Kashinotoa.
Zombies
Avian
Smart ass answer warning Bacteria
locust
Bugs. Just like real life there’s more little bugs than anyone else. Unless you make a setting without bugs, but why? Bugs are neat.
I would say demons as of right now!
Demons in human host bodies. The rest of humanity are essentially vessels for vice. Those who speak out or oppose are put in the queue for becoming a host, where there’s not a super high survival rate if you’re not there by choice.
Most of the surface wold doesn’t known it, but it’s a symbiotic duo of snail-folk and crab-folk that essentially police the rims of the deep dark abyssal parts of the ocean and keep god knows what from crawling out of it. They’ve waged ocean-floor-sized wars against abyssal horrors, with rarely a murmur noted on the surface. While technically just two species, each has many subspecies adapted to the various biomes of the ocean floor. Surface races know of only the shallow water variants such as coral reef inhabitants, playful and colorful; tidal basin variants, no-nonsense and fast moving; and the rare land-adapted variants, who can actually survive fine on dry land for extended periods. These have many dealings and trade deals with the orcs and elves etc, as well as with their neighbors in slightly deeper waters, who trade and rap with the folks in slightly deeper waters… etc. At some point you get to the true floor-dwellers, who typically congregate around deep sea chimneys or vast combs they’ve built to filter bio-food out of the water. These are massive, slow moving, powerful, and heavily armored creatures, who still see themselves as watchful guardians at the precipice of fathomless deeps
Rén. a future human species, they grow to have many many many many many zeroes in their population, so many that i havent decided
Tessans!! I haven’t come up with the specific names for the native people, but Tessa is the most densely populated planet in the system. The Tessans, out of the other planets’ inhabitants, are the closest to humans.
Humans although there aren’t many of them in the wasteland the world population is maybe a couple hundred million
I'm going to wisely assume you meant "sapient species" in your question. =p Assuming I'm right, humans are the most widespread and numerous of Aerone's sapient life, but as is common in worlds I make, they're only about 50% of the planet's population. (I estimated Aerone's population as about 2.5 billion people, so about 1.25 billion humans, and 1.25 billion total anemoi, drakkhen, dwarves, elves, half-elves, kalashtar, nekou, quai, souris, and tieflings.)
Halflings. When the elves created them the halflings were meant to be fun loving entertainers and companions. Halflings also when mixing with humans the child is either halfling or human with a higher chance of being a halfling. Thus halflings have become the most populous endimiyans
About 37 tribes live in the Patarian isles, and stranegly enough, the inhabitants, the Patarii make up the most of my worlds population thanks to the technological innovations of the Caladochii and the Adanii. The second most populous are humans, of course
Ja-Relly, a species of sentient bacteria that embodies heavy alloy metal suits for outer world exploration of their seas or ocean ships, or maybe the Krell, a species of hyper active and aggressive insect pods with metallic exoskeletons and void ships that infect worlds with their eggs and offspring. But I’d say Krell for sure
On earth? Still humans. Throughout the galaxy? The Mantoids. A utopian society and plentiful resources have allowed their population to boom into the quadrillions.
Insects and rats. Deer. Lol
Kobolds. They have no nation of their own, instead working out a sort of symbiotic relationship within other cultures and races. They also do wonderfully at plundering Yesterfolk ruins, due to small size and a knack for tinkering, which is how they usually originally get accepted by non-kobolds.
Probably the Xarans (basically a half-elf, half human hybrid); originally only possible through magic due to the species disparity, Xarans are capable of having children with other xarans and are thus self sustaining.
Kogons, a hybrid race between dragons and kobolds. In the world of Kobalera I've been working mostly offline by this point, there's 3 races. The kogons are actually fertile and can reproduce with each other. The Kobalera civilization has a population of 18,334,700,000. Of that, 18,274,500,000 are kogons, 99.67% of the population. Kobolds make up a mere 53,900,000 of the population, and dragons only 6,300,000, mainly due to their high resource demand, long lifespan, and slow reproductive cycle.
Medians, or "True Terrans". They would normally be referred to as demons by humanity, but they arent as well known or documented in "the real world" for humans to understand them. They exist in a parallel dimension named Terra, similar to earth but in a more 'infinite scale'. It was created first by the higher beings as a trial before making "Terra II" (My worlds "Earth") and humanity. They don't have the functional organs required to reproduce, but have humanoid bodies that model them. They are practically ageless, and the only way more of their species can be created is by a wellspring that absorbs sentience from other dimentions in the center of creation and converts that into new souls of these Medians. They grow like any other living being, but once they reach adulthood they stop ageing (around the visual age of 40) Due to this and their eternal longevity, they are forced to host constant genocides on the population. Not in a malicious intent though, instead as a more ritualistic passing, and only done to volunteers and/or the eldest of the species. To keep legacies alive, their knowledge is kept in a bottomless library, each book within a life story of each Median that has passed since the creation of their dimension.
Termites, technically. Oh, you meant intelligent species... human
Probably the orcs or the halflings. Despite them being slave races they are still quite skilled in specific crafts so they are formidable. But if you manage to find a group of them that are not bound into slavery they will be the strongest fighters in the world except for one nomadic dwarf tribe that’s lived for nearly 20000 years without a single death.
in my fantasy setting its probably goblins.
Slimes They can be found literally everywhere and I MEAN everywhere deserts, snowy mountains, volcanic regions, acidic terrains, cities, etc. Due to their adaptability, a small population can form and once that's done there's no going back and trust me. people. have. tried.
Haddock
If we're not counting the xenomorphs, then it'd be the Nij hands down. Roughly(getting precise numbers is a very trying task when you're spread across a decent chunk of a galaxy) 5.2 trillion of them. The Civonians are up next, roughly 870 billion. If we count xenomorphs, they win. There are entire planets infested with them with estimated populations in the trillions.
That's a hard question..... There's likely three possible candidates in terms of sapient species - else it would likely be ants or some other bug. First are the Elves, they are one of oldest, if not the oldest races in my world. As such, they've had the most time to reproduce and grow as a species, even if children are generally rarer for them for various reasons. some of the elven factions are stereotypical, with drastically low birthrates, while others have significantly higher birthrates, though gestation for pure elven children is longer than that of humans or half-elves of various other species. Second are the humans, which unlike the Elves have quicker gestation periods and an easier time procreating. They have been able to carve out a decent amount of land for themselves as well.... And so they have been able to grow their population quickly. They have a higher mortality than elves, but they are easily replaced with other humans, so that is why I believe that they could be a contender. Last, and certainly not least, are the "deathlings" massive and pale humanoids who have very quickly gestation periods and time to maturity (not sure about the exact numbers yet, but something akin to 5ish years). This is very limited though as they fight all other races and each other, to the point of being seen as non-sentient animals with the capacity for basic language by some. Of the three, my gut tells me that humans have the highest population, then the deathlings, then the elves, though again, I'm not wholly sure.
Humans And plant spirits
Humans. The population of the largest metro area of the main country is around 60 million people.
I would say orcs because they have a whole thing where the weakest of their race is constantly being pumped out as cannon fodder. I took the whole “orcs are built for war” thing and gave them a racial reason to kill each other. I’ll reply why if anyone wants to know.
Mostly humans, elf’s are plentiful but doesn’t breed very often (since most live in a town surrounded my a dome which stops time, making then basically invincible). Half of the dwarfs were either slaved by those pesky goblinoids of Gondebar or slain by them during the fall of Königreich.
Humans have the highest population overall because they tend to be created the most often across multiple planets. This is because humans appear on the Universal Blueprint, a set of universal knowledge of complex things that planetsouls use to create life on their home planet. For context, planetsouls are immensely powerful magical beings in my world responsible for creating life on their home planet via their immense magic. The Universal Blueprint gives the planetsouls the knowledge to not only create humans, but also modify humans to create humanoid species, or create magic that humans can use to make their lives more interesting and/or exciting. On any individual planet, most species don't have a significantly larger population compared to others, with the sole exception of humans. Non-human species can only be created by a single planetsoul outside of some rare exceptions, but humans can easily be created by multiple planetsouls due to the Universal Blueprint, so if multiple planetsouls create humans on a single planet then humans have an overwhelming majority.
Humans. With lots of mixing as per fantasy fashion- Made the most sense. They don't have any peculiar feature (aren't monotone). Only endurance, versatility, community (...ish), and the will to learn.
Pure numbers goes to humans (for sentient species not like an algae or something) . As a jack of trades generalist species they are going to be one of the top three common races in any given neich/area. Orcs dominate the planes and Savanah, but humans put up settlements there with a quarter of the population fortifying little dots on the map. The bird folk dominating the mountain ranges still have settlements of humans on plateaus and hidden forts in crags guarding routes. The dwarves dominate the cities below, but at every major exit known lay a trading hub looking to be the first point of contact of those quality goods. Even an icy tundra with carnivorous beast men will contend with some hunters wrapped tightly in layers of furs like a mockery of the gifts humans lack. We are rarely the best suited for a given enviroment, but we can make due good enough just about everywhere.
I think IRL it's ants? So ants in my world, too. But if we're talking sapient creatures, then it's humans. Everything else is low in numbers by comparison, unless you count demons/ghosts, but they're just the spirits of dead humans. They're more numerous than humans, though. If the human population is a bit over 8 billion total (a bit more if you count the absolute madlads who establish colonies for living humans in the Empyrean and Infernal realms, but still well under 9bi), then demons are like almost as much in total and each of them is more mentally unstable and dangerous than a human (literally tortured souls from Hell lol), whereas ghosts are much less numerous than humans, but add them all together (especially the ghosts being housed in Empyrean regions like the Garden of Eden, the Pure Lands, Valhalla etc), add the demons and the dead overall surpass the living in number. The only reason why the dead don't vastly outnumber the living is bc most people just reincarnate.
Elves are the most populous, but they are rivaled by humans, who have the largest distribution.
**If we're just talking about sentients**, there are only good censuses of humans (and only in certain countries) and the Urbesi. Humans are much more numerous; the civilized world of the Etciv plus Toyeri west of the Great wall have a total population of 550 million give or take. The three known Urbesi kingdoms have populations of about 150 million combined. This is "author knowledge" but the most numerous sentients are Utok, a hive-mind insectoid species, although whether any one individual worker/soldier/drone counts as sentient is something of a philosophical question. They've been eradicated from most of the continents but there remains a sizable population on the Southwestern continent - the Utok aare uninterested in the sub-equatorial rainforests where the local humans live, and those humans have no interest in the arid plains. Because they many are extremely short-lived, the populations vary wildly, but peak summertime population tops a billion. After that, humans, the collective humanoids generally labelled "orcs" or "goblins" by humans based on their size (although they are a number of different species, with relatively little interbreeding - individually it's not clear if any of them total as many as the Urbesi), then Urbesi, then the true Dragons, and then a small number of sentient monsters which were either magically created or developed sentience on their own after an exceptionally long life. **If you're not limiting it to sentients**, then it's not much different from earth until you get to large vertebrates. The lesser drakes (non-tetrapod terrestrial vertebrates with 4 legs and separate wings or flippers, of which dragons are the apex species) are very numerous and have been native to the world longer than tetrapods, and as such they come in a huge number of sizes.
Technically an unintelligent radiotrophic fungus that has spread to multiple habitable realms. Their mycelium networks are used as a way to hold stellar dust together and repair impact craters on the stationary outer shells of biomechanical habitats (a product of advanced techno-sorcery) thanks to a very robust glomalin production system. The combination of high intensity radiation that is omnipresent in the void between shards, and is given off by shards themselves, and the excessive waste heat produced by the habitats creates the perfect environment for them to thrive. They've also accidentally, and intentionally, been introduced to countless spherical bodies. All such bodies are hollow collections of debris packed into a tight bauble around a sleeping god, specifically a Deirex class Megadeus. Matter is drawn to the Deirex's charisma but the disdain of such a Megadeus for all things material repels it, creating an equilibrium of sorts. The inner face of such a bauble is illuminated by the sheer presence of a Deirex, often allowing mortal life to flourish, especially the aforementioned fungi. If such a bauble is the correct distance from a shard, it can also be covered in the fungi, even if it lacks the proper atmosphere and other elements to support a more complex ecosystem. They've even found homes inside the hollowed vessels of various active deities, much to their displeasure. However the abyss beneath the shards, an ocean of roiling pitch kept at bay by the pressure of a given beacon, is completely uninhabitable. It is antithetical to all existence, filled with countless, dimly glowing, hungry and lifeless "eyes" that seek to devour everything. Even the gods, and the less pious dead, fear it. The universe is also a god, an Endodeus specifically, but she's decaying and being ravaged by scavenging Exodeus after an accident caused lethal injuries and introduced foreign contaminates. The mortals and various gods living inside her are said contaminates and are experiencing reality gradually rotting around them, with entire massive expanses of it occasionally being ripped away while also falling down through her flesh and blood. Imagine slipping into a black hole while "above" you spacetime is eaten away by hordes of higher-dimensional phages, vermin, and worse. Some of the gods are waging war against the things trying to eat the universe, others are trying to keep the universe's defenses from consuming them, others sustain its organs through various means to try and buy more time, and some have also tried to get her to produce new infant universes they can escape into, and much to their frustration the fungi has found its way even there. It's even taken root in the celestial factories that reincarnate mortal souls.
Wisps, although their level of sentience varies wildly. Essentially, when a wisp comes to a decision point, it makes both decisions. But since they're tiny little mostly transparent floaty creatures 99% of the time, nobody really notices the difference between there being 30 Wisps in an area and 40, because a couple of them had to make a decision about something. The problem is this process is fantastic for making new wisps, but absolutely terrible for their sentience since what's actually happening is the old wisp dies and explodes into two baby wisps. They can refuse to split up, and if they do this long enough, they eventually gain proper sentience and some interesting abilities. But the barely sentient wisps don't actually have a reason to refuse their instincts and aren't really intelligent enough to understand what dying means until they've already refused a couple of times. So it's entirely a matter of perspective whether or not wisps are actually the most or least numerous sentient race. Because there's nothing genetically separating the Wisps that live a couple of days and then explode into two more from the ones that live for centuries and become magical behemoths. Generally, people consider the long-lived ones to be some variation of a different thing. Either as a magical version of the same race, as the Superior breed, or as the luckiest. Regardless of the explanation, the only group that doesn't separate the Wisps into different categories is the Wisps themselves. This is because whether they're 5 minutes or 5,000 years old, a wisps instinct when coming up on a decision point is to split into two new wisps. Unfortunately, the Wisps have conclusively proven that the age of the parent has no effect on the chance of The Offspring attaining true sentience. Interestingly, wisps are the only known species to have entirely avoided the concept of a patron deity due to this process. While belief in patron deities varies wildly, most wisps upon learning of the concept conclude that their creation must have been due to random chance. Because if they were intentionally created, then the responsible being could be called nothing less than a devil. That's not to say, however, that wisps avoid God's entirely. In fact, most wisps offer at least occasional patronage to this or that God of gambling or chance. This does however, cause the occasional issue, as sobriety is considered the greatest of Virtues among wisps, and pantheons of the other races have an unfortunate tendency to put gambling and intoxication into a single deity. A concept entirely foreign and bizarre to wisp culture.
In my sci-fi world that title would belong to the Chitatik. They're a vacuum living insectoid species, heavier than a human while being somewhat shorter and bulkier. They've basically monopolized fast intragalactic travel due to a hive system that effectively makes portals everywhere. Combining that with them being one of the oldest species has meant they've proliferated everywhere that has been explored, often done by setting up hives in large asteroids or small planetoids. Theres a running joke that if you fly close to an asteroid for more than 2 minutes you'll have to pull over to scrape off the viewports... which is obviously fake because if you hit one you'd probably have to fix the viewport. The little buggers are tough! Rough numbers are difficult to get accurately but the low estimates are well over a quadrillion
Vulren (fox folk) have the highest population in my world, since they have the second highest birth rate in the world. The species with the highest reproduction rate has had large portions of its population decimated by war.
Dilosians, large Crocodile-like men native to the swamp and jungle nation of Dilosia, although a majority of them stay in their homeland, with large groups of them venturing to the other continents only recently. In the western nations, it's a close tie between Elves and Humans being the majority.
Hair mites
Large bipedal felines. Currently, it is one’s based on snow leopards. Before it was the one based on lions.
Teramids, a eusocial ant-like alien species has the highest population of all Sophonts in the known universe. Compared to the roughly 120 billion humans in existence, Teramid populations sit at an estimated 3.5 trillion individuals.
Variations of beast folks, humans are a fewer bunch of traders living in powerful trading city states
Ironically, probably gods, as there are hundreds of millions of worlds, each with trillions of races, each with their multiple deitys
In the eight kingdoms that make up the Seven Civilized Kingdoms, Humans. They make up approximately 25% of the population of the Known World. If you include all three of the subspecies (Carnites, Southerners, Amazonians) who have their own kingdoms, it's closer to 60%. Elves are next at 18%, Fae at 12%, Ainuu at 6% and Others (Beastmen, Wildlings, etc.) make up the remaining 4%.
Depending on the world: Humans, a tie between Humans and Mermaids, and Zombies (but that's just dead humans)
Aberrations, monsters from the breach in reality that have grown in numbers to outnumber the sentient races.
Bugs.
realistically, it's gotta be a species of algae or bacteria, right?
In normal spacetime, rhummah (sapient primates) narrowly outnumber suvai (sapient therapods), but when considering magical-axis dimensions, ngeywiin (sapient magic-natives) outnumber both, although the measure of their population can vary wildly as there are multiple ways to define an "individual" ngeywiin person.
Of sentient, sapient species then definitely humans. There's really not many non-human races and those that there are are a minority.
Most of humans and animals, probably tens of millions. Dwarves, werewolves and dragons still grow almost high in some cities, towns and villages with each different and unique architecture. I don't tell my favorite spoilers of my world I built and created over the years, although recent revisions and some improvaments I made.
Mandrakes, their tribes are in all regions and there are more than 10 million of them
Humans, by far. Other races species only in relatively small pockets across the world. This is because races are created when a local spirit, called a Low God, that is worshiped by local humans modifies their genetics in some way.
Humans in my world are both figuratively and literally the "base race" of my world. The human population is slightly lower compared to our world. For every 300 humans you can expect a Wraith. Wraiths are dead humans still bound to this world by pact, force, fate etc. Usually a part of a Wraiths body resembles its own corpse while the other part is filled out by thick purple mist. They sometimes gain other physical traits like horns or tails further resembling their soul. Then there are Hextouched. They are technically humans mutated by magic. Their population varies highly and is solely dependent on the amount of magic in the area. Their mutation mostly let them grow body parts of animals (antlers, tusks, tails etc.) or additional body parts to those they already have. Enlighteneds are extremely rare. There is only one for every 1 000 000 people and most of them don't even roam earth. The souls of hmans who have sworn loyalty to the gods may one day become one of them (or part of them...) and their appearance may be anything. Be not afraid! Oh and I think dragons should also be counted as a race since they also have their own culture. They mostly populate areas untouched or forsaken by other races. Their intelligence depends on how close they are linked to their source of magic and their population depends on that. Less intelligent dragons feel the need to reproduce and in turn are way more common with there being one for every 100 000 humans. For intelligent dragons that ratio is 1 for every 2 500 000 Humans Hextouched and Wraiths are technically also still human enough to be counted as such.
Soulless humans. Souls have to be earned by stealing the divine flame. Most people go through life entirely unconscious and nobody has any idea.
I actually have a nice reference for this in my head, which is hardly ever used and just exists. If you took every single being In the known galaxy and compressed them into twenty people, you would have: Nine machine people, thanks in no small part to the fact that pretty much every machine more complicated than an assembly arm has its own full-fledged consciousness and identity. Five baseline humans. Two pawkin. Two hadeans. One arthropodite. And one amalgamated blob that makes up all of the theoretical, undiscovered humanlike genomes out on the fringe worlds.
Ants!
Gnomes, it is a joke on 'cheaper by the dozen' in my story. Where the gnomes used a 26 letter alphabet to communicate in code during a gnome uprising several generations ago. The couples in the race often raise large families trying to get a name for all 26 letters. Also gnomes have a higher rate of multiple births in my world. Twins and triplets are common with the record being Decuplets much like a long time record holder in the GWR. Most of the gnomes are constrained on one continent where they are ruled over by noble dwarfs.
Never really thought about this. I suppose it’s either the Dorffen, who’re the only industrialised species and live in a teslapunk communo-monarchist (yes you heard right) society, or the Yelayla, who have the largest and most fertile continent almost entirely to themselves but only have Napoleonic technology.
Goblinoid races by far. Then undead, then merfolk. After them we can start on humanoids.
Do you mean sentient creatures? Then humans.
Probably beastmen, considering the sheer variety of them throughout the world.
Definitely humans. After that, it's probably: Orcs, Hauflin (Halflings), Dwarves, Ogres (which encapsulates several monstrous humanoid subspecies), Gnomes, Elves
Cosmids live extremely long lives where they don't age notably. In fact, their life span was one of the reasons of the fae civil war.
Ummins. They’re small, gray, beaked aliens.
Kobolds. They are my worlds equivalent of goblins in terms of low power horde creatures that cover most of the plane. Definitely #1 in population, but the general rule is 1 skilled magic user = 1,000 kobolds. (Magic is very powerful and present in my world, and magic shields, super speed, and regeneration have turned most of my magic users called ‘Apostles’ into superheroes).
If we exclude Humans or Ants, then it’d be the Nekojin with a population of around 3 billion
Insects in general. There are quintillions of them, even some giant (6 foot) ones called “Stingers” (among other mutant animals, such as “Runners”, “Crawlers”, “Biters”, “Slithers”, “Choppers”, “Stompers”, “Fliers”, and “Hunters”). Insects are everywhere.
Hmmmm for my world I'd have to go with goblins because of their racial ability that pretty much allows them to reproduce with ANY species, whether living, dead or artificial andddd to have their offspring inherit traits from the non goblin parent(this only stacks to the 3rd generation, the 4th generation would be normal goblins then the next set of normies would be the 8th generation).
The Ork is found everywhere, it's species comes from spores, so even if you kill every ork, there is a chance Orks can reappear. Ork spores create an Ork ecosystem. First fungi plant orkoids, vermin orkoids, beast orkoids, slave goblins, and finally, proper Orks. Sages claim they are from a brutal realm where there is only war. Necromancy is used to kill Ork Spores, but can leave land fallow or barren. To the point that Undead/golems are let loose to guard against further Ork spread. The only saving grace to Orkoids is that their forms are edible when properly prepared. The other races in retaliation for the Orks eating other races, they are turned to food in turn.
I would assume some bug or bacteria or something but just looking at the species I’ve actually put effort into plus humans, probably cadrans. They got into space and started colonizing it first so they had a head start and have author bias but once the troodons and humans have fully integrated into the space culture and give it a few hundred or thousand years and they probably all even out. The troodons and humans did start with larger planets so they have an advantage there.
Humans first, then fairies are the most populous kind of fae.
Imps and all insectoid demons, and species. Insects be insects, even if some of them are as big as planets.
The arberos. They are tree people who eventually turn into actual trees in old age. The arbero Forrest is the largest forest in the world and is filled with incoherent whispers. Many massacre fires have been lit to make room for the next generation, though many wars have been fought to avenge their recently burned ancestors.
Generally Elves in Vanaheim (a region) due to the region being an epicenter of magic and more Dwarven as the world goes East.
Depends on how you’d measure it. - numbers on the ground? Its probably one of the insects - Biomass? The magical krill-like species that lives in the ocean. This species is kind of the core of the entire oceanic ecosystem - but between the intelligent species? Its humans. While they’re outnumbered in the home regions of other intelligent species they are unique in their ability to use both types of magic. This allows them to spread to a wider variety of enviroments and thus maintain a higher sustainable population After the humans its probably elves (who are very closely behind in terms of numbers even though there’s very few on the main continent. But its debetable if these other elves are even the same species), then dwarfs who were equal to humans in the past but after the war only survived in the most defensible places (such as mountains), and then the inellligent species which don’t really have societies that scale up to this level like the traveling orcs or technophobic goblins
Humans, Alilloi (elves/fae) are more K-selected, and Corroi (dwarves?) are also K-selected but less so and tend to be polygamous with higher ranking males hoarding most of the females, meaning most males don’t have children and less women have a multitude of children because a given male will likely have a couple favorites who end up with the most children.
Probably humans, though Razorwing Harpies & Kobolds could give them a run for their money. All three are good at building population, but the Harpies & Kobolds aren't as good as humans at keeping the population steady. (By which I mean that Harpies tend to do rather reckless things to show off for their prospective partners & Kobold engineering is on the "explodey" side.)
Goblins, being small creatures, tend to breed faster than others
Dragons
My world has 6 realms, but in the main realm, Medireg its humans as they were one of the 3 races originally there and gained control of most the realms main land pretty quickly. There's 2 other normal realms, one underground, which is mostly just the dwarves and the other is up in the sky, and that's probably mostly harpies, but the main civilised race is elves. The other 3 realms are ascendant realms, and they are home to basically the last surviving beasts from the end or the previous universe. So their mainly the dead souls captured by the 3, which are turned into separate different races. There's just too much for me to say what their top populated race is.
My story takes place as a sort of non-linear multi-verse where some people have the ability to travel between different space times. Inside of linear time, it really depends on the time/place but most of the beings who can travel inter-dimensionally are humans. This is due to some extenuating circumstances between the verses’ “gods”, some humans, and artifacts beyond even these gods knowledge and purview.
Nightkin. They tend to breed like rabbits, have one to six male to female ratio, tend to experience easy pregnancies, have minimum mandated amount of children every single one of them supposed to have, live practically everywhere (if you live in a city of any note there is nightkin colony under it) and remain fertile for majority of their long lifespans. They also can interbreed with several other species in very human like manner, except they never ever produce halfbreeds. Every child of mixed marriage would be pureblooded nightkin.