In my story my main characters are werewolves, but I'm wondering if I should include other supernatural creatures like witches or vampires. I feel like it would be odd to have a world where there are only werewolves and humans because in most urban fantasy stories there are multiple supernatural creatures. Which types of stories do you prefer or think work better?
It's all in how you do it. If you make it believable that there are humans and werewolves, that's fantastic. In my opinion: the more supernatural creatures you have, the more explaining you have to do. And if you have a great idea (of how witches created first the werewolves to take revenge on the humans for the burnings, but when they saw how things got out of control, they created a wolf-hunter-race (vampires? Faeries? Elves? Trolls? Go wild) and blah blah blah, for example) and make it feasible, I don't see anything wrong with it. Just make it believable. As to my personal taste: the less supernatural creatures, the more believable it is, but the more compelling it's written, the more the readers are willing to suspense their disbelief (look up the term 'willing suspense of disbelieve' if you don't know it - it's really good to know that stuff). When I'm reading stories that take place in a recognisable world (such as, say, (excuse me) Twilight, or Dracula, or Frankenstein), I'd like there to be only one race of supernaturals. The more races, the more fantasy. For example, Harry Potter does take place in this world, but it is crammed with supernatural creatures (of which the origin is very believable, I must add), and it's more fantasy than those others. Hope this helps.
Timothy makes a great point - it's not unusual to create a world that contains all manner of supernatural creatures, including werewolves - it's how you explain it that counts. Whenever I see a new plot that touches on these types of creatures the thing that really interests me, is how has the creator of those world explained their existence? Why / How do they exist. Why/How do we not know about them? What's their history / social structure / hierarchy? What "rules" govern their interaction with each other / other supernaturals / humans? Do werewolves hate vampires? They do? Why? Which of the "typical" traits of any given creature will the author adopt, or cast aside as myth? If werewolves exist, and there was nothing to stop them (other supernaturals for example), why wouldn't they have just overrun mankind already? I think the other reason that there are often other supernaturals involved is that given a werewolf would normally quite easily be able to physically overpower any human character, it would not create much opposition / suspense in the plot unless something equally powerful existed? That said, there is no reason to include any others in the plot, as long as you are happy with how the plot is going.... bazz
This is a good point. If you didn't want to have another supernatual/fantasy creature in your story, then you could have two sides, one good and one bad that fight each other, so that werewolves aren't over powering (running) humans. Or, like in the TV series called 'Supernatural' (and that'll be in many other things), have hunters that stop bad ones or something. If you feel that you need other supernatual/fantasy creatures, then do, but they don't really have to be a in. You could just have them mention or show a scene or two that feature another race. Most fantasy/supernatual stories propably do have multiple fantasy/supernatual creatures, but I think, if you plan and write it right, your story could work with just one. Hope I've made sense and helped in some way!
For me, the whole Warewolves Vs Vampires thing is played out. Which bugs me because it never made sense to me in the first place. For me, I think less is more in these cases. Don't just put a slew of fantastic creatures of the night into your books, because when you have warewolves, vampires, ghosts, witches, fairys, goblins, trolls, etc all populating a world that is not supposed to be aware of them, that suspension of disbelief that Timothy was talking about just flies out the window. For me, if I was writing a story about warewolves, I'd want to go hardcore traditional. They're people, who turn into wolves at the full moon. Because after a few months they'd notice that they were somehow going out and slaughtering people and waking up in pools of blood they'd isolate themselves from society. This would limit the chances of spreading the curse. Thus, I have a warewolves story that doesn't require any other fantastic elements. This of course obviously depends on the type of warewolf story you're telling. If people are fully aware of the risk of warewolves, then it's a completely different story, and a completely different situation. Maybe your warewolves fart rainbows and burp unicorns and look less like wolves and more like puppies so everyone falls in love with them, and as such, they're no threat to humans.
What will you benefit from adding more supernatural creatures to the story? If you can't think of anything substantial, I don't think you should go for it. As Timothy said, the more things are different from the norm, our world, the more explaing and introducing you have to do. For example, if you were planning to write about the conflict between two different groups, adding vampires to the mix wouldn't really add anything to the story. But if you wanted to tell a story about something like power imbalances between different groups, witches could actually make the set-up more interesting. Also, multiple types of supernatural creatures are more likely to occur in a series. This is because you need more time to establish everything and a series needs to add something more by each installment to stay interesting. In urban fantasy, something more tends to be more supernaturals. (For example, Mr. Supernatural Detective has a vampire case in Book One. In Book Two, he encounters werewolves. Book Three is about elves, etc.)
I prefer stories that center on one or two species. Other species might exist, like vampires, but they will only be mentioned in passing.
