Bonus points if you can play a clownfish-based merfolk who literally transitions from male to female as it reaches adulthood :P
That... if that's happening to the entire heritage, that has some potentially unfortunate implications.
Bonus points if you can play a clownfish-based merfolk who literally transitions from male to female as it reaches adulthood :PThat... if that's happening to the entire heritage, that has some potentially unfortunate implications.
Hmmm... my fish knowledge isn't peak, but here's what I found.
Clownfishes do change gender as they mature, but they can also... trigger it early if there's no dominant female in the school. They also are all born male that become female.
I think Merfolks kinda follow the same reproductory process. I assume that mermaids lay eggs and mermen fertilize them, exactly like fishes. If any kind of fish has their merfolk equivalent, clownfish merfolks can be found. Alluria's Cerulean Seas setting has better plausible details.
The way I could see it is that a clownfish merfolk would naturally transition between middle and old age (using old terms here), but it is possible for them to trigger it much earlier, like using a 1st level feat, which can be taken at any time, including at character selection. If that's case, I would add some small bonuses for taking it, or split that heritage into 2 for both genders.
Sounds complicated, but there's something viable to do here ;)
A clownfish hierarchy is basically:
Dominant Female
Mature Male
0-4 Juvenile Males
If one of the upper roles becomes vacant, someone gets promoted to fill the void. Amusingly this means that after Nemo's mom disappears Nemo's dad would become the new dominant female, and Nemo (being the only remaining juvenile) would become the mature male. Because of the human taboo about incest, it's good that Clownfish do not actually raise their children like people do. Normally in the ocean this is easy to do since fish don't raise their young so you just deposit your eggs in the nest the male has made nearby and when they hatch the larvae will float away carried by ocean currents and no longer be your responsibility.
But breeding clownfish in a home aquarium is comparatively easy to do (you buy 1 clownfish let it grow a bit, then buy another one and you have a breeding pair) so you need to be careful about inbreeding.
Really my concern was the "as it reaches adulthood" thing... implying that the entire heritage (or most of it) was the result of sexual pairings involving underage males. That's just not a good look, you know?
If the default behavior is something like "become female at the equivalent of age 30" or something, that's a lot less of an issue.
Beyond that... I'm not sure about the standard fish spawning techniques. In particular, merpeople are people. For best results, they're going to need a society that puts effort into their upbringing. That doesn't really fit with the "I spawn a huge number of eggs and hopefully at least 10% make it to adulthood" strategy that most fish have.
Really my concern was the "as it reaches adulthood" thing... implying that the entire heritage (or most of it) was the result of sexual pairings involving underage males. That's just not a good look, you know?
If the default behavior is something like "become female at the equivalent of age 30" or something, that's a lot less of an issue.
That's why I suggested between "middle and old age" which would be around 40 years old in human years.
Beyond that... I'm not sure about the standard fish spawning techniques. In particular, merpeople are people. For best results, they're going to need a society that puts effort into their upbringing. That doesn't really fit with the "I spawn a huge number of eggs and hopefully at least 10% make it to adulthood" strategy that most fish have.
Merfolks may be people, but their physiology are half-and-half :P Everything below the waist is fish-like.
Beyond that... I'm not sure about the standard fish spawning techniques. In particular, merpeople are people. For best results, they're going to need a society that puts effort into their upbringing. That doesn't really fit with the "I spawn a huge number of eggs and hopefully at least 10% make it to adulthood" strategy that most fish have.Merfolks may be people, but their physiology are half-and-half :P Everything below the waist is fish-like.
When I said "people" I didn't mean "humans". A sapient species that's at all successful as such is going to involve a fair degree of effort into childrearing, which pretty much inherently invalidates the "have enormous numbers of children and then let the significant majority of them die" plan. I'm pretty sure that merfolk populations aren't by default constantly expanding in size by significant multipliers, which means that they aren't having enormous numbers of children and then not letting the significant majority of them die, either. Basically, we can expect, just as a matter of demographics, that the total number of children that merfolk produce will be roughly in line with the numbers produced by other sapient/civilized species.
So... whatever it is that they're doing, it's not the standard "huge clusters of eggs" thing that most fish do, regardless of their physiology.
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You guys realize Goblin children are raised in cages right?
This whole latest tangent is disturbing and bordering on kink discussions about genitals and simultaneously ethical hand-wringing over hypothetical sexual reproductive traits, age of sexual maturity/consent for fictional creatures, and just insanely silly even if it weren't trying to push a certain subsection of real-life human culture/morality and morality onto chimeric humanoid creatures.
Why are you guys trying to sanitize and moralize fictional cultures? Let creatives be creative... seriously, this is "Tolkien fiction is problematic" levels of absurd because of how Orcs in his setting were created.
You realize goblin children are raised in cages right?
This whole latest tangent is disturbing and bordering on kink discussions about genitals and simultaneously ethical hand-wringing over hypothetical sexual reproductive traits of fictional creatures and just insanely silly even if it weren't trying to push a certain subsection of real-life human culture/morality and morality onto chimeric humanoid creatures.
Eh... the cages are good for them.
also, I'm not meaning it as a matter of morality at all. I'm talking about the practical requirements of producing adults that can maintain your civilization, and what that implies about how much you need to invest in them, and thus how much you need to value them in order to remain functional as an ongoing culture. It's pretty clear that merfolk have some moderately impressive civ. Goblins... not so much.
That said, I can dial it back.
Beside, even if mermaids would lay multiple eggs for a male to fertilize...
1) I doubt they would have over 30 eggs at once
and
2) I doubt that most of these would die ^^;
A mermaid, in my opinion, probably lays 2 to 5 eggs, and all grow up into healthy babies once hatched :)
Maybe to bring it back to my theory, what I have in mind is that merfolks share some traits with fishes corresponding to their tails.
Sharks are fishes, merfolks are fishes, so merfolks can be based on sharks. If so, they have wider tails, a dorsal fin and probably very sharp teeth and fangs. If you have an angler merfolk, it either has a glowing lure or can produce bioluminescense. I don't expect a sword merfolk to have a long pointy nose, but I could get around it having wristblade-like blades.
For clown merfolks, aside from orange scales, I could see them changing gender... and probably be resistant to polymorph magic ;)
Beside, even if mermaids would lay multiple eggs for a male to fertilize...
1) I doubt they would have over 30 eggs at once
and
2) I doubt that most of these would die ^^;A mermaid, in my opinion, probably lays 2 to 5 eggs, and all grow up into healthy babies once hatched :)
This is a much more viable proposition, and I have no opinion on it one way or the other.
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This is a much more viable proposition, and I have no opinion on it one way or the other.Beside, even if mermaids would lay multiple eggs for a male to fertilize...
1) I doubt they would have over 30 eggs at once
and
2) I doubt that most of these would die ^^;A mermaid, in my opinion, probably lays 2 to 5 eggs, and all grow up into healthy babies once hatched :)
That was always the intent :)
Oddly enough, neither WotC or Paizo has ever stated how fertile a merfolk is, even when they introduced them as playable races/ancestries.
WotC revealed that an elven mother is far LESS fertile than a human and that a halfling mother is pregnant for SEVEN months instead of nine, thanks to Races of the Wild, but no news about a mermaid's gestation, egg laying and whatnot :P
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I figured merfolk were more in common with dolphins and whales, meaning they would give birth like those two.
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I mean, what's the difference between a cage and a crib really? Every people figure out a way to temporarily keep their children in some place where they can't get into that much trouble because the adults have other business to attend to.
It also gives them something to gnaw on. Young goblins need to have things they can gnaw on.
I figured merfolk were more in common with dolphins and whales, meaning they would give birth like those two.
I said this due to how merfolks have fish tails, not cetacean ones.
Then again, cetacean merfolks could be a thing, but that would require not being able to breathe underwater O_o
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Purveyors of fiction are rarely concerned with the nitty-gritty details of the fictional societies or species they invent. Just whatever is the minimum for the story they want to tell.
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I mean Pathfinder Hobgoblins seem pretty similar to DnD Hobgoblins apart from some small details so not saying they will be dropped but I wouldn't be surprised and the same goes for Bugbears
Hobgoblins are in the Player Core 2 remaster.
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An idea that would be kinda cool, but I don't know how likely it'd be:
What if the Awakened Animal ancestry we're getting in Howl of the Wild allows us to play Awakened DINOSAURS?! That'd be SWEET!
Playing an iruxi's an okay substitute at the moment, yeah, but it doesn't quite have the same "cool factor" as an Awakened T-Rex!
I’m not sure an entire species is ok with being called an “okay substitute”. ;)