
Corathonv2 |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |
I'm pretty sure Tolkien never considered the option for half dwarves but it should also be noted he never envisioned half elves as a subspecies also. Aragorn and Arwen's son was Eldarion but he was human not elf or half elf in the D&D sense of the species.
Yeah, in Tolkien, a child of an elf and a human got to be one or the other. Elrond chose to be an elf, his brother Elros chose to be a human.

avr |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

The descendants of Elros were more like D&D half-elves than D&D humans. Aragorn was over a hundred years old by the time of LotR. Didn't look it, did he? Though that's partly due to his ancestors living in a magical land, Numenor, long life was associated with his bloodline in particular more than the other Dunedain.

![]() |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

If you want to play a dwarven halfbreed, play an Oread. They've been living with dwarves for generations and sometimes interbreed. They even have the dwarf-blooded feat to prove it.
Then add the mostly human racial trait to your Oread, and you can have a PFS-legal "half-dwarf."
Hmm

taks |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

If you search the web with this question you'll find a million explanations, mostly related to the fact that half-dwarves did not exist in the worlds Gary Gygax and compay were drawing their material from. I remember reading that Gygax did not like the concept of half-dwarves either (I do not know if his reasoning was based on anything rational) and refused to put them into the game as an option. I did a cursory search but couldn't find the reference.

Tacticslion |

Gnomes/Halfling-- I just assumed size does matter and stuff often didn't fit together.
Dwarves-- How do races with charisma penalties breed with themselves?
One of the interesting things about gnomes was that I'd long had the head-canon thought that they were the half-breed results of either a dwarf/Halfling pairing or dwarf/elf pairing... as well as humans.
For the latter as a possibility, I always looked at Ligers and Tigons for examples of how and why that might work - specifically that the size-controlling traits may be passed down one way, but not another, and with two size-limiting functions (from the smaller-than-human elf, and the smaller-than-human dwarf)... well, you get a smaller character; one with neither inhibitor (or relatively few) yields the larger (medium-sized) character.
As for the lifespans, though one of the children (the gnome) inherits the life-extension concepts of the parent races, it still more limited than the maximum of the longer lived (because half-breeds often have more limited lifespans); the same limited lifespan also describes how human lifespans are so relatively short.
It didn't work in FR, obviously (as FR had it's own way of handling dwarves) but it made a lot of sense to me, over-all, and handily explained how humans could have breeding potential with so many other races (being descended from them).
Unfortunately, Pathfinder has put the kebosh on this idea, given that gnomes are explicitly from the First World, elves aren't fey, and dwarves seem to have arisen as a uniquely Golarion race.
My new headcanon is that elves and dwarves are sexually-selected and magically reinforced offshoots of the lashunta race and humans are their recombinatorial hybrid children.
The lashunta-descended humans are but a single strain of humanity - as it turns out, "human" is a useful stand in for several different hybrid races (mostly by incident) that happen to be biologically compatible with one another via other humanoid races lacking the goblin subtype. This is a nice side to permitting parallel evolution/multiple independent special creation narratives.
Also, Halflings are half gnome and half human. As for them being smaller than either - well, again, that's again the liger/tigon effect. It explains Halflings' fey-like elements, and yet more mortal aspects (and similarly associated features to those of humans), as well humans' strange and unexpected relationship with them - it's unclear when Halflings showed up, but they seem to have just kind of come from "amidst" human settlements. That seems like a perfect gnome fascination-plus-experimentation-resulting in surprising and/or unwanted or "weird" children, leading to them growing up in the shadow of human kind. Their inherited tendency toward exploration and travel makes sense, and their association with humanity makes sense.
The timeline doesn't necessarily match up exactly, but that's not entirely unexpected - the First World is noted as being awkwardly timeless (and out of phase with time in some respects) and doesn't even break the theory - a large enough collection of people - travelers or conjured - ultimately result in a stable population size that permits it to continue. Besides, the timeline might match up: it's noted that the first recorded instance of Halflings was in -3470, while Gnomes migrated some time after -4202: that's a nice 800 years between potential Gnome arrival and the earliest possible instance of first recorded notice (it's actually likely to be longer - while there is a ~800 year span for the Age of Anguish in which the gnomes could arrive, there is a ~5,000 year span for the Halflings to be first mentioned). It's true the elves claim they "noticed" them before Earthfall, but that means little - gnomes could have been migrating and, ah, "integrating" with humanity from time immemorial - I doubt Earthfall made the First World a "thing" that it wasn't prior to said event (if only because of half-remembered possible hints indicate that it's had contact from the before Earthfall).
Anyhoo, that's my completely non-canon guesses: they do exist and, in fact, are all around you...

Ouachitonian |
1 person marked this as a favorite. |

I've actually had similar thoughts before, should I ever somehow end up coming up with my own universe, I was thinking of the much-ballyhooed ancient feud between dwarves and elves having to do with the fact that humans are the result of taboo elf-dwarf pairings, and both races now blame the other for humans being a plague upon the earth and their rabbit-like multiplication having driven their progenitor races into near-extinction. Or something like that, it's still just the germ of an idea atm.