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They're both originally from Golarion, so far enough back they must, right?
Taxonomically speaking, that it.
Probably Humans and Halflings, too.
Elves and Gnomes aren't originally native to Golarion, so likely no commonality there.
I wonder about Dwarves, tho. Both from Golarion, but Dwarves were never on the surface.
Could be a very distant common ancestor under ground where it eventually evolved into modern Dwarves. Or perhaps life developed today independently down there. Who knows!?
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you assume that anything on galorian cant have a common ancestor from another plane, far enuf back even elves and halflings could have the same common ancestor. maybe some form of Ancient Humanoid form that all humanoid shaped creature share as a common ancestor.
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Yes, Pharasma. She created all the other (non-outer) gods when she walked the spiral at the beginning of the universe, and some of those created humans and orcs.
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Both Dwarves and Orcs come from underground, so they are maybe more likely to be related in that way.
Humans do seem very adaptable, similar to Elves in D&D. In D&D there's a dozen elf varieties, in Pathfinder the human descendants seem to be; azarketi (sea humans), fetchlings (Void humans), caligni (cave humans), morlocks (cave humans but Gollum'd), Urdefhans (human souls warped into funky vampires by Daemons), Aiuvarin, Dromaar, then all the versatile heritages.
My personal Pathfinder lore is that the gods create most intelligent species and they often copy existing species. Humans first appeared on Earth and the gods of Golarion decided to copy them. Other humanoid species are variants of the humans invented by the gods. Gods that wanted crafting-oriented humanoids invented dwarves, gods that wanted stronger humaniods invented orcs, etc. Elves and gnomes might be an exception because they came from the First World.
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Weren't Golorian humans, apes magically advanced by the Algolthul magic to fight the serpent folk? While it is hinted an possible halflings share ancestry from them but the other humanoids don't seem to share such a connection.
My personal Pathfinder lore is that the gods create most intelligent species and they often copy existing species. Humans first appeared on Earth and the gods of Golarion decided to copy them. Other humanoid species are variants of the humans invented by the gods. Gods that wanted crafting-oriented humanoids invented dwarves, gods that wanted stronger humaniods invented orcs, etc. Elves and gnomes might be an exception because they came from the First World.
This is a cool headcanon! I know consistency with established canon is probably not a priority in this case, but for the sake of clarity I thought it might be useful to point out that Pathfinder elves don't seem to share a particular connection to the First World that gnomes have. There's certainly no evidence against the theory that elves first immigrated to Sovyrian from the First World, but the elf-fey connection doesn't really seem to exist aside from that.
On the other hand, if you go back far enough into the Age of Creation when the elohim designed intelligent species to populate the First World when it was a template for the gods' eventual work with the Universe, it's entirely possible that humans could have been one of the early designs to come up, and inspire many others.
For that matter, wasn't it somewhat implied that humans could actually be the latest and furthest removed descendants of the titans via giants? I don't recall that specifically being disproven, although I vaguely recall there was some manner of Word of God on the subject a while ago.
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For my own unofficial headcanon, I have long liked the idea that when the gods set the worlds of the universe spinning, they didn't so much 'flash of light' create species to exist in the world as used the natural processes we're familiar with go with a tweak here and there to achieve this or that desired result (or as in the case of Azlant, alghollthu gene engineering was used instead). This lets me thread the needle on 'designed by the gods' without necessarily giving up on the idea of a reality shaped by familiar biological processes.
(that humans exist on 3 separate planets is an open mystery in the setting said to have a canon answer that has been alluded to before, ofc)
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Given that elves and orcs can produce viable offspring with every humanoid ancestry, by most taxonomical models that I'm familliar with the collective humanoid ancestries of Golarion make up a single species.
Given that that we're including reptilian Iruxi and Nagaji with Mamallian Humans and Avian Tengu, I think it's safe to say biology on Golarion works differently enough from how it does in the real world that real world models are going to break down.
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Given that elves and orcs can produce viable offspring with every humanoid ancestry, by most taxonomical models that I'm familliar with the collective humanoid ancestries of Golarion make up a single species.
Given that that we're including reptilian Iruxi and Nagaji with Mamallian Humans and Avian Tengu, I think it's safe to say biology on Golarion works differently enough from how it does in the real world that real world models are going to break down.
Interestingly, the term "species" is basically something that evades our attempt to define it. The classic definition you hear, a collection of population groups that can breed to create viable offspring, would classify meaningfully different populations as one species against our common sense. For example, polar bears and grizzly bears are separated geographically and have diverged substantially enough that almost everyone would call them different species, but now the melting of the polar ice caps are driving them to interact, and they can create viable offspring. There are also concepts like ring species - population group A can breed with group B in the next valley over, who can breed with C in the next valley over, etc, until you get to population group Z who are completely different from A in every meaningful way (and can't create viable offspring together), but it's not plausible to draw a dividing line between any two population groups and say that's where a species starts or ends. You've even got species that aren't geographically separated at all and can create viable offspring but do not and have diverged sufficiently to be considered different species - you just need a temporal separation. For example, one population group can be active during daylight hours and the other at night; if they did interact they can produce viable offspring, but they'll not do so naturally, and so differentiation has occurred to the point that we call them different species.
Tl;dr is that taxonomy is extremely complicated and the word species is fake and made up (all words are), and I agree that there's not a point in trying to apply our taxonomical understanding to Golarion
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My personal Pathfinder lore is that the gods create most intelligent species and they often copy existing species.I still remember being amused when I read Jack Chalker's Well of Souls series, which has a similar minor backstory plot point. I.e. There were many creators. A few were great artists. But most were mediocre and just plagiarized the works of the good ones...which is why the universe is filled with human-adjacent bipeds. :) As a sci-fi justification for why there's all these human-like beings, many of which can breed with humans, it's not bad.
The Well of Souls is a great series!
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Also this isn't unique to elves and orcs... they only get the attention because the legacy of human auvarin and dromaar kn the game. The mixed ancestry heritage isn't that particular and the Tian Xia World Guide has a an example of a tengu-elf character.
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Also this isn't unique to elves and orcs... they only get the attention because the legacy of human auvarin and dromaar kn the game. The mixed ancestry heritage isn't that particular and the Tian Xia World Guide has a an example of a tengu-elf character.
Never underestimate what intelligent horny beings with access to magic can accomplish.
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(that humans exist on 3 separate planets is an open mystery in the setting said to have a canon answer that has been alluded to before, ofc)
If you mean Earth, Androffa and Golarion, note that those are the 3 worlds that Rovagug took an interest in just before the deities decided to cage him within Golarion...
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I don't think Rovagug has anything to do with humans existing in three galaxies at the time necessarily. I would assume it has something to do with either the intelligent design of the universe (it was literally made by gods so it would make sense to repeat formulas that work in other places) or that these three planets have more in common than one would think. I don't think its an accident that, for whatever reason, Androffa's ship ended up in Golarion of all places and that recently (10 or so years ago) a gateway to go from Earth (Russia to be precise) into Golarion was made, but even before that someone like Baba Yaga was already capable of traveling between the two planets. I wouldn't be surprised that, if Rovagug does anything to do with it, that back in the primordial universe there weren't really galaxies but like a single "galaxial mass" for lack of a better term, which once it interacted with Rovagug it splitted itself into the galaxies that currently exist in the setting. In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if Earth, Golarion, and Androffa actually used to be a single planet that was "sliced" in three different planets at some point. At least Earth and Golarion seem to have similar landmasses too, which kinda gives more weight to this theory.
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Given that elves and orcs can produce viable offspring with every humanoid ancestry, by most taxonomical models that I'm familliar with the collective humanoid ancestries of Golarion make up a single species.
Given that that we're including reptilian Iruxi and Nagaji with Mamallian Humans and Avian Tengu, I think it's safe to say biology on Golarion works differently enough from how it does in the real world that real world models are going to break down.
Well, rocks and fire can also produce viable offspring with every ancestry. So biology is more of a polite suggestion in this setting. A quaint local custom, really.
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If you think the cross-compatibility issues are weird, just remember that a bipedal cat can have an anime catgirl as a fraternal twin, without inter-species relations. Probably best to assume the land is so imbued with magical energies that all life in Golarion literally has magic written into its very DNA, with all the problems that solves & creates. So, compatibility issues are nothing, when their genetic code can just cast a spell on itself to smooth it over.
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Frankly this whole discussion is why I hate that D&D went with "species". I don't know what the designers and lore team intend, but I personally have always felt like all of these ancestries were just kinds of human, and evolutionarily share a common ancestor. Humans, elves, dwarves, halflings, gnomes, orcs and so on are all basically the same thing, and as such I think they should be treated as more alike than different, biologically and evolutionarily/taxonomically speaking. I do think the people in the world would not agree, but ofc like racist irl, they'd be wrong
If I were to make my own fantasy setting I would probably separate these sort of like:
Homo-originalis, the common ancestor which is most likely homo-sapiens, what we now call humans. Elves might be homo alfheimeri or something. Except these all would get fantasy names
All of them would be humans, but what we call humans now get a new name and ofc we have the common names of elf, orc, halfling etc. Maybe even goblins are humans, but perhaps it is convergent evolution, but I'm genuinely unsure what they'd have evolved from in that case... Maybe they're caniforms and evolved from some proto racoon? Who knows
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I agree with everyone else that the answer is likely something along the lines of "magic..." *wiggles fingers*.
That being said, it's important to remember that from a biological standpoint, humans on earth are by far the exception to the rule about multiple species of the same genus. Compare that to say the Panthera genus (lions, tigers, etc.) which has 5 extant species, and those are large apex predators. For smaller animals, like mice, you could have as many as 60 different species.
Currently there is only one extant species of the Homo genus, Homo Sapien Sapien, i.e. anatomical modern humans. As recently as 150,000 years ago (a blink of an eye in geological terms) there were as many as 4 or 5 different human species running around simultaneously (that we know of). There is also evidence that they interbred.
The idea that there are large number of homo genus species on a planet is well within the realm of biological possibility.
Plus you know... "magic..." *wiggles fingers*.
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My advice here is, don't try to apply science to this fantasy world. It's not going to make sense and it doesn't need to.
Like there are/were humans on planets in three different galaxies (the ones containing Earth, Golarion, and Androffa). That doesn't happen naturally.
My advice here is, don't try to apply science to this fantasy world. It's not going to make sense and it doesn't need to.
There is nothing contradictory between science and a fantastical world. The people who invented science believed in magic, science just happened to more or less disprove magic in our world. And we definitely can make natural selection make sense in a fantasy world. It's hard to not view biological reproduction in a way that doesn't have the mechanisms which makes the evolution of species possible. Presumably all life still has a genetic code, presumably life still passes on traits to their children, and presumably mutations still arise. Sorcerers show how this process can involve magic, and it even fits in our modern understanding where genes are less deterministic and often environmentally triggered. Such and such magical component of the genetics of a sorcerer can lay dormant for generations before some mutation, or environmental component turns those genes on. Not unlike how theoretically you can do stuff with the genetics of birds to make them grow tails and teeth like some of their mid-to-late Jurassic ancestors
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Indeed. It's certainly within the realms of possibility, especially with the understanding that most writers aren't biologists. The standard sci-fi/fantasy-family writer tends to assume all humanoids are compatible regardless of species, since they either don't understand the genetic implications or don't let them get in the way of worldbuilding; at best, the work might acknowledge that inter-species fertility is not at all the norm, and either provide an issue or make it an explicit in-universe anomaly that scientists are trying to figure out. (Such as, e.g., Star Trek: TNG eventually did, where the answer was that most if not all humanoids are offshoots of a common ancestor, seeded by a near-godlike precursor species; essentially "evolution by intelligent design".)
That said, in the Pathfinder universe's case specifically, where it's a known and proven fact that creator deities exist, you can literally download a soul (if you're an android), the same species (or exactly identical species) can be found on multiple planets in multiple galaxies, and the line between mortal & deity is basically just a really strong suggestion, I would personally assume that we are dealing with multiple distinct species with varying levels of shared genetic code, and the differences are smoothed over with the same background divine magic that most Oracles rely on.
At the very least, we know that something funny is going on, considering that humans are known to be genetically compatible with lizards that may or may not pretend to be human (Dragonbloods, descended from dragon ancestors), giant alien fairies from another universe (Half-Elves, assuming at least lip service to original Germanic elf lore, and that the elves' ancestors were from the First World), literal angels from Heaven & demons from Hell (Nephilim in general, Aasimar & Tieflings specifically), embodiments of pure elemental energy (planar scions in general; Ifrits are especially notable, since their elemental ancestor may or may not have been literally made of living fire), and so on. Considering that some of these don't even have any form of genetic material, and some are from different planes of existence...
giant alien fairies from another universe (Half-Elves, assuming at least lip service to original Germanic elf lore, and that the elves' ancestors were from the First World)Pathfinder elves have no connection to the First World at all. Gnomes do. You mix them up with dnd elves. Golarion elves are aliens from a neighboring planet (most probably).
Yeah, Golarion Elves came from the planet Castrovel, although I don't think it's widely known that it's another planet (at least in the Pathfinder setting). Whether the Elves came from someplace else before reaching Castrovel, well I haven't seen anything to indicate that is the case, but it's not impossible.
Ah, I see. I couldn't find much info on their background, so that's good to know. They still _seem_ to have a bit of fae ancestry, as far as I can tell; is this accurate, or a false positive?
(Either way, it does mean that PF-verse humans are compatible with literal space aliens (that may or may not be giant alien fairies), which should be biologically impossible if nothing odd is going on. ;3)
Yep, that's DnD, but I'd also add our myths link elves to a First World too. It's fairly natural to imagine the Wild Hunt, Court of Fae/Sidhe, etc. as elfin humanoids. And PF/Golarion elves retain such a strong connection to magic, it's easy to suppose all that cultural momentum carries over (even if another planet interrupted their journey).
In my limited experience with Starfinder, I didn't find anything particularly magical or elfin about Castrovel (right?) in our party's adventure there. Seemed more like a place that would attract elves rather than develop them. More savage jungle w/ elf cities quite separate rather than integrated as in traditional high fantasy.
Anyway, I think one of the original points stands best: the deities created sentient beings. And apparently most had a mind to enable them to interbreed. My question would be "Why?".
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Anyway, I think one of the original points stands best: the deities created sentient beings. And apparently most had a mind to enable them to interbreed. My question would be "Why?".
I would assume that it's a legacy from the First World, which was the dress rehearsal for reality in which everything was a lot more mutable so that the various entities pulling the levers could iterate on their designs more rapidly.
So like thing-A could interbreed with thing-B not because of any sort of specific design that made this possible, but because nobody bothered to flag it as impossible.
Like I'm assuming during the design process there were all sorts of designs for "how many eyes and limbs does a person have" and they stumbled on "one head, two eyes, two legs, and two arms" as a pretty good design so they forked that one to make a lot of different people.
Like I'm assuming during the design process there were all sorts of designs for "how many eyes and limbs does a person have" and they stumbled on "one head, two eyes, two legs, and two arms" as a pretty good design so they forked that one to make a lot of different people.
>Cyclopes mythology has entered the chat :P
Joking aside, of course humanoids can interbreed with one another... what creative type hasn't made a bunch of OCs and immediately shipped them with all of their friend's OCs? It's only natural.
That said, gotta be pedantic for a moment and say that I'm not sure we can be so certain tracing sapient creatures all to a specific act of deific creation. At the very least alghollthu claim to have existed in the Universe since before the deities started paying attention to it. Likewise, for every humanoid ancestry said to be created by a specific deity, there's one that was probably designed by the gods at some point but for whom no creator has stepped forth to claim authorship, to say nothing of the non-humanoid sapients. And this is just as well for me, who tends to find a poorly planned 'a deity did it' origin story slapped onto any old ancestry as a somewhat lazy and overly homogeneous option when there are so many diverse beings in the setting.
Sure, it's possible maybe Ihys and Asmodeus and the others did actually design every sapient creature that would walk the Universe way back at the beginning, but time passes and things happen and maybe reality has gotten a little more complicated since then, and that's something I like.
Yep, that's DnD, but I'd also add our myths link elves to a First World too. It's fairly natural to imagine the Wild Hunt, Court of Fae/Sidhe, etc. as elfin humanoids. And PF/Golarion elves retain such a strong connection to magic, it's easy to suppose all that cultural momentum carries over (even if another planet interrupted their journey).
AFAIK First World doesn't have anything to do with magic either. The First World is were souls take form and are sent into the Material Plane / Universe.
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Yep, that's DnD, but I'd also add our myths link elves to a First World too. It's fairly natural to imagine the Wild Hunt, Court of Fae/Sidhe, etc. as elfin humanoids. And PF/Golarion elves retain such a strong connection to magic, it's easy to suppose all that cultural momentum carries over (even if another planet interrupted their journey).AFAIK First World doesn't have anything to do with magic either. The First World is were souls take form and are sent into the Material Plane / Universe.
The first world was like a test case to make the material plane. And something to do with souls was a big difference, but I can't recall the exact details. Also creatures native to the plane don't really "die" as long as they're on the plane, they reform after some time.
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Yeah, Creation's Forge (formerly the positive energy plane) is where souls are formed, the deities put the First World close (in a metaphysical sense) to Creation's Forge in order to make use of the ready supply of souls. One of the reasons the First World is unstable is because of the proximity of the source of life and growth and that sort of thing. One of the things learned in the dress rehearsal is basically "if we put it a little further away from the light, it grows better."
The first world being the staging area for souls before they're sent into the universe is probably because the Gods just didn't want to replace the protocol that safely removes souls from Creation's Forge and puts them some place they can grow into a wide variety of things (the things that can survive in an environment of pure vitality are highly specialized for that purpose.)
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Yeah, it used to be if you were on the positive energy plane you would have your wounds healed. If you didn't have any wounds you would gain temporary hit points. I think if those hit points reached double your normal hp you would explode with positive energy.
I think my group had an adventure that partially took place there, we had to sleep in shifts and periodically stab ourselves so we didn't explode.