Well, you often get thinly-disguised (or not disguised at all *
cough*) different-elemental-affinity variation between civs of various kinds/sub-kinds.
Sometimes they do it with Humans (or viewer-surrogate humans[1]) as JOAT/unaligned/equipotently-mediocre and then cast 'elementals' to create points of interest/need.
Being
Dwarf Fortress, we'd see dwarves as the average. Elves more Earth/Black Bile (or Wood) aligned, Humans more Water/Phlegm (or Earth?), etc. The exact fitting depends upon who you include and therefore which particular mythologies (both elemental and racial) you try to fit to.
[1] Your starship is mostly filled with Central Casting types, but the bridge-crew and handy-secondary-stations-like-Engineering get notable minorities (Earthly, alien, artificial) that represent a hyper-example of one of the four(/five/whatever)-elements, humors or similar. And the Fellowship Of The Ring does it in nine 'elements'
(one example of where they gain their personal powers... Frodo: Heart; Sam: Earth; Gandalf: Light; Legolas: Wood; Gimli: Stone; Aragorn: Fire; (<- or vice-versa? ->) Boromir: Ice; Merry: Wisdom; Pippin: Knowledge ...but you could argue about these extensively, and do it with most tropey-nines you could conceive.)