Intelligent nonhumans have long been common among fantasy settings, but I have to be honest - I don’t like them in most circumstances. Why? Well, you’ll have to hit the jump to find out.
The basic idea of intelligent nonhumans is ancient; elves and dwarves were part of ancient Germanic myths, and Greek mythology is full of various nature spirits. However, these were all separated from humanity by their very nature, and interacted with humans rarely, if at all. This all changed (mostly) because of J.R.R. Tolkein. The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit changed the way that dwarves and elves were viewed by fantasy fans, and was among the first to treat nonhumans as protagonists in any way, as far as I am aware. This isn’t too bad on its own; the dwarves, elves, hobbits and orcs were clearly dying out, and their cultures were kept separate from the humans. Bilbo’s journey with the dwarves and the Fellowship of the Ring were treated as strange occurrences that hadn’t occurred in ages, and I liked that. Sadly, many people took the idea of nonhuman races that were friendly with humans (up to this point unheard of) and ran with it, and that is where the problem comes in.
Dungeons and Dragons is the worst perpetrator here, but it exists in other media - cosmopolitan cities where humans, dwarves and elves mingle freely, with only the occasional tension between them. Elves are essentially long-lived humans with pointy ears, while dwarves are short humans with beards and axes - what’s the point? The key strength of LotR elves and dwarves is that they act in ways significantly different than humans (though the dwarves didn’t show this as effectively) and this seems to be lost on most current writers.
As far as I can tell, this started simply as a way to make characters special and unique, but has gradually evolved to allow writers to simply but a nonhuman race as a replacement for real human cultures. I’m not innocent of this - the goblins of Tyranix were inspired by how Jews were (and are) treated by much of the world. This is actually the only way that I’m somewhat ok with nonhuman and human races mingling, and a big part of that is the fact that the various races would not be equally powerful or influential in a society; it is a sad fact of history that minority groups are discriminated against in horrible ways. Dragon Age portrayed this well, with the City Elves being confined to alienages (ghettos) in the cities. Dragon Age also had excellent examples of the other way to have interesting nonhumans: make their culture alien.
The Qunari are roughly a head taller than humans, with horns of varying size and a significantly different body structure. In most settings they would be the proud warrior race, essentially Klingons with horns. Bioware took them in a different direction, with a culture that is completely alien and almost unimaginable from a human perspective. They are also the most fascinating race in the game, and are the only reason I played as much Dragon Age 2 as I did. The dwarves and dalish elves also had unique cultures, but in less extreme ways, though this is largely because they had playable characters.
Another example of this approach is Jim Butcher’s Codex Alera series. There are four nonhuman races, and they all have significantly alien perspectives; the Canim value enemies more than friends, the Marat can’t comprehend telling lies and have many of the traditionally evil barbarian traits (including cannibalism), the Icemen are… well, it’s not entirely clear, though they are all empaths, which is their defining trait, and the Vord are huge locusts that are linked into a hive mind.
Basically, what I’m saying here is that the best way to incorporate nonhumans is to make it clear that they have alien mindsets that are difficult to understand at best - it’s worth noting that the default response to the Qunari in Dragon Age and the various nonhumans in the Codex Alera is to kill them, with only exceptional individuals able to overcome their differences. While Tyranix and Aquas don’t do this very well, that is mostly due to fitting into an already existing setting - the Magic: the Gathering multiverse. I’m trying to do this with the psaria and savra in the Iroas setting, partially by choosing a different root language for them; where the Iroans use a lot of Greek words, the savra use Russian and the psaria use an as-yet undecided language (possibly Japanese or Chinese) to make it instantly obvious that they don’t fit in, thought it should be noted that psaria and savra are based on the Greek words for fish and lizard, respectively.
I want to make it clear that almost everything I talk about only applies to fantasy settings. Science fiction gets something of a pass when it comes to having tons of races because of the massive nature of their settings - it’s ok to have tons of races when they each have their own world to call home. There is also the fact that in most sci-fi settings it is more accurate to label them as different species, as they can’t interbreed - Star Trek is a notable exception here, as almost every race can breed with any other race.
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