So, to make a society in a fantasy story that folks can believe, you have to work hard. Or steal a lot from reality and other writers... I chose to take from reality and do some hard work, twisting things a bit. My dwarves are Russians, to an extent, but not perfectly so... my humans have other traits, mingling many cultures... and my elves are a bunch of pseudo-Romans... This was my choice, you will make your own choices along the way, as you write. Hopefully, your choices will bear better fruit than mine did. But, still, you will need to build a believable society and civilization from the choices you make. Not all wish or survive in anarchy, the normal state of a writer's mind.
To demonstrate this, I offer a peek into my mindset, my world, yet again. This time, into my notes and the way I wanted to deal with my elves.
When crafting a society/civilization you absolutely must craft certain things, even if you never/barely share them with your readers. You have to know this, to make the characters of that race worthy of the reader's interest. I chose four major issues, and six minor to work out... you may disagree and work others, it's up to the writer to figure out what matters most for their little sandbox of mental daydreaming.
My choices to use as a framework were:
1: Constituents of the civilization
2: The governance
3: Geography and Resources
4: Past History of the civilization.
the minor ones were more mundane
1: Religious Beliefs
2: Social caste system (based on several things, namely family of birth, allegiances of families, and areas of origin).
3: Weaknesses and strengths of the constituents (powers and weakness, really)
4: Associated creatures (something I added late in the game, and wish I'd worked out earlier)
5: Trade and crafts used and made, to include currency, technology, and art forms
6: Calendar and Lifespan issues.
This set out, I'm only going to deal with one part today, to show where my mind was at and headed towards with my elves.
Looking at the constituents of the civilization, a thing that evolved as my world setting grew and aged into something more than just the normal game setting so many of us started with, I began playing with things, tweaking some, totally changing others.
The biggest change I made, something recent in my world setting, came from the realization that elves once had wings, and some still do. This led me to realize more about their origins, and begin to play on things. The other beasts and creatures with six limbs came from Athalan, the next planet towards the sun of my world, and were the dragons and demons.
So, it made sense to show the elves as the angels, some fallen, some rebelling, some still connected to the powers that summoned them from one world to the other. And to make them related, yet distinct, from the demons, devils, and dragons.
Early on, though, I'd set them as the eldest race, so that leaves me with things to reconcile, as I moved forward with the writing of tales in the setting.
Which led to the first division of my elves, the winged versus the land bound. the Aetheral and the Terrestrial. And to link them, all, somehow to earthly species of birds, common to my lands.
Aetheral elves I will leave for another day, they are isolationists, for the most part, and very fractured in their own ways from the others. Save a few bands, mentioned in the tale "Journey to Freedom".
So, the Terrestrial elves lay already all over the place in one continent, so I began to play with why they went to those places, and what made them who they were. This lead to five main branches of elves, all Roman or Etruscan, though one branch took on Greek tones, early Greek, not modern.
I knew for a while of the division of Islander versus mainland, desert versus woodlands, sedentary versus nomadic. Which gave me the five branches. The Insulari, those of the 10 gens (clans){my Decemviri) that ruled the islands and their slave gens, the Quintas, the five noble birds of the desert and their lesser allies, the Sextus, the six forest birds and their relative gens, the Migratia, the wandering tribes, and the Sedantaria, the settled ones...
Really, only the first three mattered, the Decimus, the Quintas, and the Sextus. The others moved on or faded into the background of time, for now.. someday I intend to show them, but not now.
Determining that the Insulari or Decimus were waterfowl related, the islands made sense as their home, the quintas were the desert just inland, and the Sextus were the woodland elves. Over time, the wanderers became my drow. Just how it went.
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