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Magic, the Earth and All That Jazz

Magic, an ancient practice rooted in rituals^[1], is a long established tool in this world. While it's known that it originated with monsters, there are a few schools of thought on how they ended up with humans: thinking there was an old monster race that could breed with humans and simply having the power bestowed by the friendship with dragons being a few examples.

At any rate, magic is a normal tool used in everyday life, both by those who have it and those who have magical tools. Because of the commodity of magic, it's used as everyday household items like cookbooks and soups.

In addition, this place has got, like, flora and fauna! Classic fantasy style but without the other races, just humans. There are so many ridiculous places and plants.

Magic Users vs. Magicians

Magic users are people who don't have the inherent ability to use magic, but are able to make use of magical items to get the job done. All items are able to channel magic through either being imbued with magic through the act of creation (sewing, cooking, etc.) or by having a crystal holding magical properties.

Magicians are people who can just use magic all willy-nilly. They're often the ones to imbue these items with magical properties.

Magical Item Usage

Magical items are often used to make life just a bit better. Cookbooks to aid making foods, golemstones to create golems to help with everyday chores, self-help books as a sort of placebo effect to increase your everyday mood, the list goes on. These items are used by magicians and magic users alike, although the result is often better with magicians. Take golems: for users, depending on the quality of the golemstone, it may last for a day while magicians can make the golems last for much longer depending on skill.

Charms are also a big hit. Aside from maybe basic luck or stamina ones, they're mainly treated like astrology, where there's a great amount of people who believe in it but also many who discount it. This is due to them having a low percentage chance of working the exact way you'd want it to. The more effective charms are more general, hence being more useful but the ones that deal directly with people (because love charms are really popular) have less of a chance of working the way the user wants. Charms had a large role in past wars and battles, especially with monsters, but the more complicated society became, the less accurate charms were. There's a field of study dedicated to it but magic is hard to understand.

(P.S. This whole section may be absorbed by another encompassing section)

Flora

Since it's basically Earth with the magic and monster sliders pushed to the max, there's not many different plants that's not in fantasy media. There's the mandrakes, well-populated mushroom biomes, and mystical precious stone quarrys.

Mushroom valleys are very popular due to the climate. They're very humid but well regarded for the novelty of having a house covered in mushrooms. They are only found near or in mountain ranges.

Residents are often free spirited hippie-types, scientists, and cutesie mushroom girlies. Attention has picked up in the area due to an HGTV-type series about living in the area and repairing and selling the houses. Since most mushroom valley towns are well below thousands of residents, many are apprehensive or against this new wave of people. Some have taken advantage of the tourism and have shifted towards building resorts catering to this traffic.

Fauna

Regarded as different from monsters, animals are pretty chill. Mostly normal pigs and deer and stuff, with a few quirks like elk with extra horns or sheep with extra legs. While still regarded as animals, monsters are seen as destructive creatures compared to other animals, leading to the mega-fauna distinction. As such, there's animals thought of as smaller versions of major monsters. Dragons have their wyverns, which are basically scaley dogs with wings, griffins are linked with falcons and other birds of prey, basilisks and leviathans are linked with snakes, and minotaurs are linked to bulls and cows.

Monsters

Also known as mega-fauna, there are lots of different kinds of monsters. They're normal fantasy types and are treated as basically another type of animal. The main difference is their destructive nature and they're categorized as monsters based on their danger to humans.

They lived more equally alongside humans in the past but, with humans becoming more industrialized, monsters started to fight back more against the overall spread of the human population.

There are nomadic tribes that live alongside monsters, migrating when they feel either their presence is no longer welcome or as a counter migration to monsters that change nests often and migrate themselves. The groups often settle in the areas where the monsters migrate from and make use of their waste -- often feces or large amounts of food disposal.

Citations

1. From the beginning of the magic page on Wikipedia.