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Is it wrong that my first two answers to this question are:
"If a daddy half-elf and a mummy half-elf love each other very much..."
and
"Child benefit."?
Pfah! Goblins have been humping mummies and zombies and skeletons and rocks that look like bones and rocks that don't look like bones and wickermen and bees and Cages for {holds up two fingers} tens of thousands of years.
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Pfah! Goblins have been humping mummies and zombies and skeletons and rocks that look like bones and rocks that don't look like bones and wickermen and bees and Cages for {holds up two fingers} tens of thousands of years.Is it wrong that my first two answers to this question are:
"If a daddy half-elf and a mummy half-elf love each other very much..."
and
"Child benefit."?
Ouch, that gives a whole new meaning to Mummy Rot...
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Hmm i like the breeding program idea since the female elves of my current campaign are almost completely infertile. Any more ideas on that line. What would be the personal and social purpose of such a union? and how woud it be recieved? Just looking for inspiration here.
Well, another reason would be the fact that half elf babies are presumably much easier to raise than full elf ones. I mean, the starting age for elves is around a century. I never really got around to finding out whether that was due to a completely stretched out adolescence (as it they are in diapers for decades), whether they grow quickly but then just plateau in growth at a certain point (puberty?), or whether they grow up quickly, but they simply retain a child-like mentality for decades. I am vaguely sure it is option B due to the iconic rogue's backstory.
Anyway, the point is: you want kids but you would rather not take too long raising them. It takes roughly the same amount of time it would to raise a human (16 vs 20 as the starting age for untrained classes is negligible to elves) A bit of human blood would help with that. Diluting it for more fertility throughout the race might be a good idea based off of what you said about your campaign.
But a breeding program does not necessarily have to be all dark and evil, you know. Some offers of financial support while raising hybrid kids, maybe scholarships provided for half-elves at universities, decent positions open in military careers, an awareness program here and there. Once you get it a bit normalized to have hybrid children and attract half elves from outside the community, and you can just let wine and smooth jazz take care of the rest (maybe lower taxes on both to further help the situation). Getting 3/4 elves should be enough to help with fertility issues and keep them 'pure' enough or whatever drivel.
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Ouch, that gives a whole new meaning to Mummy Rot...Pfah! Goblins have been humping mummies and zombies and skeletons and rocks that look like bones and rocks that don't look like bones and wickermen and bees and Cages for {holds up two fingers} tens of thousands of years.Is it wrong that my first two answers to this question are:
"If a daddy half-elf and a mummy half-elf love each other very much..."
and
"Child benefit."?
Smart gobs aways remember where to find a patch of russet penicillin.
Immaculate conception and test tube baby in an alchemist lab.
Technically not so. He was born of a human male and female elf yes. But he was granted the choice of living the life of man or elf, as was his brother, and he chose eleven life. So there is no distinction between him and all the other Noldor elves except for experience.You know Elrond was a Half-Elf, right?What if you'd had to listen to "Lord Elrond" drone on and on about it for a century to you hit adulthood?
I'm not so sure that's entirely true. Was his brother Elros a perfectly ordinary human after choosing humanity? Look at his descendents the Numenorian kings (and Aragorn) and it's pretty clear there was some Elvish influence on that bloodline.
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Can everyone please forget I ever brought up Elrond?! Or at least take it to a new thread?
Alcohol.
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A human and a Vulcan are involved in a transporter accident and it makes two identical half elves, I mean half... wait what are we talking about?
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A human and a Vulcan are involved in a transporter accident and it makes two identical half elves, I mean half... wait what are we talking about?
A human and an elf are involved in a teleport spell accident and it makes two identical half elves.
A beautiful and unscrupulous elf takes advantage of human’s ridiculous inheritance laws.
She’s wed and buried seven human aristocrats so far, and her estates have grown vast. She has several half-elven children who look older than she does, and is encouraging them to start families of their own so that her great-great-great grandchildren can look after her in her old age.
Fascinating, definitely stealing that one.
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I've had many elves in my Golarion campaign be quite promiscuous prior to marriage as part of their personal growth, coupling with all manner of races that they might find attractive. Humans are just the only race that result in offspring!
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I've had many elves in my Golarion campaign be quite promiscuous prior to marriage as part of their personal growth, coupling with all manner of races that they might find attractive. Humans are just the only race that result in offspring!
Only With humans, huh? Surrrrrree......
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Derranged human fan girl drugs poor, unassuming elf male.
On a more 'serious' note... Maybe there could be a wealthy human woman nearing the end of her child bearing years that really wants a half elf baby so she pays a large sum for 'stud service'. The child would grow with all the other wealthy kids and be taunted and tormented because of what the mother did.
I've had many elves in my Golarion campaign be quite promiscuous prior to marriage as part of their personal growth, coupling with all manner of races that they might find attractive. Humans are just the only race that result in offspring!Only With humans, huh? Surrrrrree......
Oh my o.o
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This topic is a central theme of Fantasy author Katherine Kerr's Deverry Cycle Novels. Note that she was also an early & original contributor to Dragon magazine, a lifelong RPG gamer, and that her (excellent!) celtic fantasy novels are full of half-elves, sorcerers, and dragons.
Since I'm a big fan of this series, and have read all 15 books aloud, I'll present two big reasons she gives for having half-elf babies:
#1 Lust! One main character, Rhodry Maelwaedd, is half-an-elf. His mother, Lovyan, is a wealthy and powerful human noblewoman who married an older human warrior, Lord Tingyr. Young Lovyan is a dutiful wife and and bears Tingyr two human sons. Tingyr is a drunken sot who always has a mistress or three on the side.
One day a diplomatic envoy of elves comes to visit Lord Tingyr. The leader, one Devaberiel Silverhand, is a famous elven bard who sings sweetly and is magnificently handsome. Tingyr gets drunk and goes off with some mistress. Lovyan becomes overly enthusiastic about her duty as proper 'host' to the painfully gorgeous elven bard and, voila, bun in the oven.
Being a married noblewoman Lovyan pretends the babe, whom she names Rhodry, is Tingyr's. She is terrified the baby might pop out with pointed ears or other obvious elven heritage, but it is not so. Tingyr never suspects, and raises Rhodry as his own son. Tingyr dies in a drunken accident a few years later. Rhoddry thinks Lord Tingyr is his father, and has no idea he is part elf. Rhoddry has unusually good night vision, and some other half-elf advantages, which he keeps strictly to himself.
The dramatic tension comes when Rhodry's older brothers all die in battle, leaving him to inherit the great rhan. At the same time Rhodry's half-elf brother shows up. The other PCs figure out that Rhodry is half-elf, but they conceal this from him, because he's too damned honorable to keep it secret. If it becomes public that Rhodry is a bastard and half-an-elf, and therefore no son of Tingyr, then he loses the inheritance.
Rhodry eventually figures it out, but is able to compromise his 'honor' enough to keep the secret and become a great Lord. His role is to keep the peace between humans and elves.
#2 Ecology! Later, the story follows the dying elven race. They have been driven from their ancient cities and live on the grasslands as horse nomads. Being long-lived, with low fertility, they never have enough babes to replace deaths from their difficult lifestyle. Humans breed like rats, and are crowding out the elves. The elf leaders eventually get to know Rhoddry and some other half-elves. The elf king decides that the best way to save his race is to interbreed with humans: the resulting half-elves have hybrid vigor, can usually pass for human, and are quite fertile. The elf king marries a human woman and makes her queen of the elves. The implication is that, while the elf race will eventually go extinct, it will live on by merging with fecund humanity. It's a poignant decision.
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I've got a group of elves in my current campaign who consider it more socially acceptable to have extramarital dalliances with humans than with other elves. This is partly because half-elves are not allowed to inherit elven titles or properties within that culture. A half-elven bastard is much less likely to cause problems for your legitimate heir/s than a full elf.
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I like science...
The reason why a horse and a donkey can breed is because of similar genetics, even though they have different amounts of chromosomes (Donkey has 24? horse has 26?, and a mule ends up with 25). Because a mule has an odd number of chromosomes, they cannot breed.
We can therefore assume that either elves and human chromosome counts are the same, or differ by a factor of 4 (Half elves can continue to breed). If half elves can continue to breed with humans, then elves and humans must have an equal amount of chromosomes. This would also be true with orcs and humans. Therefore, I conclude that an elf/orc breed is genetically possible.
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Perhaps orthodox elves only occasionally (like, several years or even decades often pass between sessions) engage in sexual relations, once in a while an elf decides to have a non self-induced orgasm more often than every century or so ... and gets more than he or she bargained for, because humans are much more prolific.
Or maybe elven females only become fertile once every seven years? That would still allow elves to boink all they want which is conducive to happy marital relations. It also means that inter-elven side-dalliances have little chance of producing unplanned offspring, which would muddy royalty and inheritance lines. Maybe when elves and humans first encountered each other, the elves just assumed that dalliances would have no lasting reproductions... imagine their surprise at just how fertile humanity was. By the time word got around, it was already too late to stop a whole generation of baby half-elves from being born.
The breeding issues & my own knowledge of biology have always bugged me. But, it does make the appelation "races" (IE, the are all the same species, different varieties) more reasonable. People greatly underestimate the need for proper etymology.
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Technically not so.You know Elrond was a Half-Elf, right?What if you'd had to listen to "Lord Elrond" drone on and on about it for a century to you hit adulthood?
Lord of the Rings, Appendix A, Annals of the Kings and Rulers:
The sons of [Earendil] were Elros and Elrond, the Peredhil or Half-Elven.
He's referred to by the name Elrond Half-Elven several times; it's evidently salient enough to be an epithet, just like "Richard the Lion-hearted." I'm not sure in what sense you can claim that he wasn't a half-elf.
Actually, treating all the "races" as the same original species could make sense;
-Humans are baseline
-Elves are fey-touched (distant relation)
-Dwarves are earth-touched (distant relation)
-Direct planetouched/halfbreeds (tiefling, oread, half-orc, etc.) is pretty obvious.
-Halflings are little people (real ones)
-Gnomes are fey-touched little people
-Goblins/Orcs/hobgoblins are deeply mutated/feral little people/humans
-Pretty sure grippli/catfolk/tengu/kobold/other anthropomorphized animal species cant breed with humans short of wish (I think).
-Dragons/outsiders can breed with anything, so they dont count.
So basically, a large portion of the races could easily be perceived as "the same species". We have made a marvelous breakthrough in the zoology of Golarion!
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In the above scenario, the fertility limitation is female elves.
... and you know this because.... ???
Here's a hint. Not only are elves fictional, they're also not human, which means anything we know about biology from humans doesn't apply. (In Greek myth, "a god's embrace was never fruitless" [Odyssey, book XI].... every woman whom a god seduced bore a child of that union. So much for human "fertility limitations.")
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Actually, treating all the "races" as the same original species could make sense;
-Humans are baseline
-Elves are fey-touched (distant relation)
-Dwarves are earth-touched (distant relation)
-Direct planetouched/halfbreeds (tiefling, oread, half-orc, etc.) is pretty obvious.
-Halflings are little people (real ones)
-Gnomes are fey-touched little people
-Goblins/Orcs/hobgoblins are deeply mutated/feral little people/humans-Pretty sure grippli/catfolk/tengu/kobold/other anthropomorphized animal species cant breed with humans short of wish (I think).
-Dragons/outsiders can breed with anything, so they dont count.
So basically, a large portion of the races could easily be perceived as "the same species". We have made a marvelous breakthrough in the zoology of Golarion!
Gnomes are not fey-touched; they're descended from actual fey and are very likely not even remotely related to the other species.
Unless, of course, humans are also descended from fey and what we're seeing is just the different sub-species of the main species, with the main itself potentially extinct (this phenomenon actually exists with humans in real life; Homo sapiens is technically an extinct species, with Homo sapiens sapiens being its inheritors).
I only added gnomes because I thought they could breed with humans;
But it could very well make sense that ALL these creatures descend from another (currently extinct) species and only appear as such because of their local enviroment (Elves the fey, dwarves underground, ???) that caused them to transform.
I know, I know, it's fantasy and all that but DARNIT I want some versimilitude in breeding habits. (tongue in cheek)
But honestly, if anybody asks in my own games, that will be my answer; if they are able to breed together, they HAVE to have descended from a common ancestor. IE, dwarves, elves, humans, halflings, orcs (maybe others) have the same common ancestor.
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But honestly, if anybody asks in my own games, that will be my answer; if they are able to breed together, they HAVE to have descended from a common ancestor. IE, dwarves, elves, humans, halflings, orcs (maybe others) have the same common ancestor.
And since dragons are able to breed with everything, everything is descended from dragons!
That might actually make for a good creation story for a setting.
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But honestly, if anybody asks in my own games, that will be my answer; if they are able to breed together, they HAVE to have descended from a common ancestor. IE, dwarves, elves, humans, halflings, orcs (maybe others) have the same common ancestor.And since dragons are able to breed with everything, everything is descended from dragons!
That might actually make for a good creation story for a setting.
Reminds me of Eberron.
I dunno... dragons & outsiders be weird... and while many settings allow their breeding, I tend to think it's a croc. I appreciate a world with self-consistency; and if it only works that way "because the creator demiurge decided so" it really bugs me. I'm more and more convinced there are few scientists (and much less biologists) ending up working on games...
Then again, we could easily say that dragons & outsiders are non-biological in nature, that they are some sort of pseudo-construct like thing that can change it's own biology, or to whom biology means nothing.
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I dunno... dragons & outsiders be weird... and while many settings allow their breeding, I tend to think it's a croc. I appreciate a world with self-consistency; and if it only works that way "because the creator demiurge decided so" it really bugs me. I'm more and more convinced there are few scientists (and much less biologists) ending up working on games...
Then again, we could easily say that dragons & outsiders are non-biological in nature, that they are some sort of pseudo-construct like thing that can change it's own biology, or to whom biology means nothing.
They also tend to be 'supernatural'. Particularly powerful dragons and/or outsides could just point at an elf/human/gnome/Halfling/whatever female and say, "You shall carry my child" and it'd be so.
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An elf being shipwrecked and not among their own people and lonely and falling in love sounds like a reasonable backstory.
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I believe I read somewhere that if a half-elf has a child with either a human or an elf, the child is still half-elven. Thus half elves breed more half-elves when they sire or have kids.
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I like science...
The reason why a horse and a donkey can breed is because of similar genetics, even though they have different amounts of chromosomes (Donkey has 24? horse has 26?, and a mule ends up with 25). Because a mule has an odd number of chromosomes, they cannot breed.
We can therefore assume that either elves and human chromosome counts are the same, or differ by a factor of 4 (Half elves can continue to breed). If half elves can continue to breed with humans, then elves and humans must have an equal amount of chromosomes. This would also be true with orcs and humans. Therefore, I conclude that an elf/orc breed is genetically possible.
That is a rather broad assumption, since, while technically correct from the basic rules of genetics (although how much those apply when you can be a descendant of a fire elemental is up for question in setting), there could be countless other genetic issues that could affect the possibility of conception. I mean, depending on certain factors, sometimes even humans can be poor matches for each other as far as fertility goes.
There could be any number of issues involving hormones, or even anatomical issues (I tend to picture elves as rather slender over all...and I imagine those of orcish blood to always have at least some considerable mass to them... I'll leave the rest to your imagination, but I will say this: Aliens tm.)
Unless, of course, humans are also descended from fey and what we're seeing is just the different sub-species of the main species, with the main itself potentially extinct (this phenomenon actually exists with humans in real life; Homo sapiens is technically an extinct species, with Homo sapiens sapiens being its inheritors).
Isn't everything descended from fey? Well, kind of, since I am fairly sure that, in the setting, it is the 'rough draft' of the material realm, isn't it?
Overall, I would try to avoid finding some nice clean taxonomy. Everything can boink everything else it seems, and the various races were all created by gods and/or bored magical creatures, and have gone through various paradigm shifts as they built empires, lost empires, were forced underground/space by cataclysms, and were all generally affected to some degree by the various magical radiations that come from every freaking where. It would be hard to find anything that wasn't part something else, despite the fact that it should be impossible (I mean, look at all the sorcerer bloodlines)
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Derranged human fan girl drugs poor, unassuming elf male.
On a more 'serious' note... Maybe there could be a wealthy human woman nearing the end of her child bearing years that really wants a half elf baby so she pays a large sum for 'stud service'. The child would grow with all the other wealthy kids and be taunted and tormented because of what the mother did.
Bonus points if this is an adventure hook. The honest and decent elven men of a flourishing city, have been preyed upon by a sexual predator. There is a spate of attacks every 10 months. They hire adventurers to find the culprit.
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There is always the creepy one too...
Where your elf parent raised your human parent from a child into adulthood, then they hooked up, and eventually your human parent dies of old age before you're even an adult. Cuz.. humans don't live long.
so Wife Husbandry or a hikaru genji ploy?
george takei made that joke about his significant other (who's much younger) "if you can't find the proper person, raise them."
though that was as a joke.
on other fronts, there's rape (duh), a consensual loving relationship (also duh), political/religious arrangements, furtive trysts between the two (humans like elves for their beauty and grace, elves like humans for their tenacity and zeal in everything they do in their short time), having two half-elf parents, magical experimentation, and more.
on breeding programs: i've actually seen someone reason that elves could simply breed humans out of the picture if they put their minds to it--everyone takes human lovers to produce half-elves, those half elves mingle with the elves (further reducing the human lineage in them in further generations) and the process continues while the "pure" humans die out of age--eventually the remaining human blood in the later generations would be so negligable that they would be full elves at that point.
it would require all the elves very actively seeking human partners and acting to impede humans from simply marrying each other, as well as keeping half elves from marrying into the humans gain but it would be doable. elves have a much longer span of time to work with, after all.
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There is always the creepy one too...
Where your elf parent raised your human parent from a child into adulthood, then they hooked up, and eventually your human parent dies of old age before you're even an adult. Cuz.. humans don't live long.
so Wife Husbandry or a hikaru genji ploy?
george takei made that joke about his significant other (who's much younger) "if you can't find the proper person, raise them."
though that was as a joke.
on other fronts, there's rape (duh), political/religious arrangements, furtive trysts between the two (humans like elves for their beauty and grace, elves like humans for their tenacity and zeal in everything they do in their short time), having two half-elf parents, magical experimentation, and more.
on breeding programs: i've actually seen someone reason that elves could simply breed humans out of the picture if they put their minds to it--everyone takes human lovers to produce half-elves, those half elves mingle with the elves (further reducing the human lineage in them in further generations) and the process continues while the "pure" humans die out of age--eventually the remaining human blood in the later generations would be so negligable that they would be full elves at that point.
it would require all the elves very actively seeking human partners and acting to impede humans from simply marrying each other, as well as keeping half elves from marrying into the humans gain but it would be doable. elves have a much longer span of time to work with, after all.
You've just given a perfect evil plot.
You've just given a perfect evil plot.There is always the creepy one too...
Where your elf parent raised your human parent from a child into adulthood, then they hooked up, and eventually your human parent dies of old age before you're even an adult. Cuz.. humans don't live long.
so Wife Husbandry or a hikaru genji ploy?
george takei made that joke about his significant other (who's much younger) "if you can't find the proper person, raise them."
though that was as a joke.
on other fronts, there's rape (duh), political/religious arrangements, furtive trysts between the two (humans like elves for their beauty and grace, elves like humans for their tenacity and zeal in everything they do in their short time), having two half-elf parents, magical experimentation, and more.
on breeding programs: i've actually seen someone reason that elves could simply breed humans out of the picture if they put their minds to it--everyone takes human lovers to produce half-elves, those half elves mingle with the elves (further reducing the human lineage in them in further generations) and the process continues while the "pure" humans die out of age--eventually the remaining human blood in the later generations would be so negligable that they would be full elves at that point.
it would require all the elves very actively seeking human partners and acting to impede humans from simply marrying each other, as well as keeping half elves from marrying into the humans gain but it would be doable. elves have a much longer span of time to work with, after all.
the guy's reasoning was for his elf-centric setting. the reason humans weren't available as playable was because humans had died out in that manner. (orcs and half-orcs were pretty much exterminated in later crusades, but that wasn't related to that particular plot)
I allways tell my kids that I rolled over in my sleep :)
Maby a youngish elven lass deciced she has a serious thing for the big muscely fighter type.
Women need a reason, men need a place, and most women decide if there intrested in the first 15 sec of meating a potential mate.
hehe, "meating"
I do my best :P
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I like science...
The reason why a horse and a donkey can breed is because of similar genetics, even though they have different amounts of chromosomes (Donkey has 24? horse has 26?, and a mule ends up with 25). Because a mule has an odd number of chromosomes, they cannot breed.
We can therefore assume that either elves and human chromosome counts are the same, or differ by a factor of 4 (Half elves can continue to breed). If half elves can continue to breed with humans, then elves and humans must have an equal amount of chromosomes. This would also be true with orcs and humans. Therefore, I conclude that an elf/orc breed is genetically possible.
If I may bring Elrond back into the discussion for just a moment, Tolkien (in his letters) states that elves and humans are actually genetically identical and the same species, otherwise they couldn't interbreed at all; the difference is in their souls, not their bodies.
Possible reasons include:
1) You just saved Middle Earth, and damn it, it is about time.
2) Political Marriage.
3) Forlorn Elves are pitied by their elven comrades, so accepting human lovers, even though you know they are going to die in a fraction of your lifetime, is more likely.
4) An elf falls in love with a human. This isn't as strange as it might seem since all throughout mythology such affairs is commonplace, if a bit shunned depending on allegiances.
5) You are a human living in the one town in Kyonin that allows humans in. Sure the Winter Council will hate you for it, but who cares so long as they don't try to kill you.
Despite the name half elves don't have to be strictly one half elf. You could have quarter elves or even 1/16 elf. Pretty much the same way tieflings and aasimars aren't necessarily the 1st generation extraplanar being. I can't wait for the Bastards of Golarion companion to come out. I've always liked half-elves (and pitied half-orcs). There were also several third party books in 3.5 that dealt with more specific things like gestation, elves would have apainful pregnancy because of the rapid development of the embryo (comparatively) while humans would have VERY long but easy pregnancies. So far as rape babies its FAR more common for half-orcs than half-elves. One of my favorite races in 3.5 was the fey-ri, the result of a forced breeding program between elven slaves and demons.