I have quarter-orc and 75%-elf NPCs in one of my games.  Which raised another question-if humans can breed with elves and orcs, why would elf-orc genes not blend?

In reply to habsin4 (msg # 26):

Actually, if you go back to Tolkein, which is what a great majority of elvish & orcish races are based upon, one might recall that the Orcs were of Elvish descent. The same race. Avari (dark elves) subverted by Morgoth and twisted into a foul form.

Also curious that we have half-Orcs and half-Elves but no half-Dwarves...

In my own campaign there are a number of Half Elves, and there are entire populations of Humans with some Elven heritage, but Half Orcs are very, very rare.

It's one of the reasons Orcs (and to an extent, others) find Humans and Elves insufferably obnoxious: Humans and Elves believe that since they find each other attractive, so must every other race in the world.  The average Orc finds an Elf or Human about as attractive as a warthog, but much harder to get along with.

(To be fair, the Orcish opinion of warthogs is a little higher than the Human opinion of warthogs.)

In reply to Jarodemo (msg # 28):

My take on this is that, like real life dwarfism, they may be a carrier of the gene, but it won't be a blended expression.  Instead, the dominant or expressed gene will prevail.  In other words, the children will be either one or the other, not something in between.

That would make the half-orc or half-elf an exception to the general rule, and not make that blended expression the rule itself.

I think that also makes sense with the half-elf-half-orc idea since elves and orcs derive from common genetic ancestry, so either one gene or the other will be expressed, not both.

That's just my dime-store genetics education talking...nothing too scientific.

I have read a couple of books that had 1/2 dwarf characters in them. They are just rarer.
Now a half halfling, what is something different, would likely look like a human with hairy feet.

One thing I have been using in a Pathfinder game I started a few weeks ago is that humans are just plain WEIRD. Humans can breed with most other races, but all the other races cannot breed with each other AT ALL or at best produce mules. It's a special human thing, so half-orks and half-elves cannot breed with each other or with their other parent race, and if they breed with humans there is a 50/50 chance of their child being another 'half-breed' or just a human that looks a little odd. (For example like me they might have little bumps on their ears from where the ears almost formed a point but it's not something you would notice unless you were looking for it.) Every generation of such mixing after the first the chance is halved again 75/25, then 87.5/12.5 and so forth.

(Actually this is slightly more realistic than the option I used, in the version I am using half-elves and half-orks are fully fertile with both races and each other, but I have rules in place for half breeds of both those and other kinds having mixed offspring: they just are much to complicated to reprint here.)

I think there's a human/dwarf crossbreed race in DnD 4th Edition called Muls - as far as I can remember they're stout-looking humans who have good strength and endurance and stuff.

I think that the offspring of two races which have bred together should show physical traits of both. After all, there are horse-zebra hybrids (can't remember the name now but I know a zebra-donkey is called a zedonk) which look like partially-stripy horses. Ligers (lion/tiger but I can't remember which is the male and which is the female - the other way round produces a tigon, though) look like lions but they are huge (because their "stop growing" gene is a bit messed up, or something - tigers are the biggest of big cats), and I think they have faint stripes. And so on.

In my campaign there is no half-halfling, not because of fertility issues but because of the nature of the faery taint.  Sages will say that all the little folk have some relationship to the faery hedge (you cross it and you are in a layer of the border ethereal tainted even down to gravity by a hallucinatory terrain).
The least related of the smallfolk, according to sages are the halflings. The Sages refuse to discuss halfling house keepers, halfling stories about the stubbornness of Halfling housekeepers are the stuff of legend and they are almost a law to themselves.
If you find someone other than a halfling who knows [halflings know better then to blab]. Halfling housekeepers have been known to fall for the bachelor master of the house, that they Keep for.  Their stubbornness has been known to drag whole sections of the house across the faery hedge into an image of the house formed by the housekeeper.  The Sages get nervous discussing this since it brings one to question the boundary between illusion and reality.
The standard (what I call shireling) family of a housekeeper to a dwarf, may find its self with stout nieces and nephews running around the halls, and their bedrooms are have a second door that leads through the faery hedge to their fathers house. the halflings let outsiders assume that they came from somewhere else.

Due to the Nature of the household reality there are no half 'Halflings' only subraces or clans.. now I wonder what halflings would live near Gnomes..   Ach-brownies-oo"..
This message was last edited by the user at 07:38, Fri 20 Mar 2015.

Correct me if I'm misremembering, but I thought there were certain lines of halflings (like the Stouts or something) that originated from breeding with dwarves.  So it didn't create a halfbreed as much as a new type of Halfling stock.

Muls were from the darksun campaign setting.

would explain where the tall fellow halflings came from, they breed with humans and just get a taller halfling.
So you can cross a halfling (hobbit) with other races but you just get a new breed of halfling when it works as they breed Truer than humans or other races. (and have far less predujest(?) about mixed relations)

I have actually played a racist character who hated mixed blood characters and npcs. This allowed for a lot of unique roll play however it did result in small problems in the party. Good characters cab be as racist as others. Racism is a matter of ignorance more than anything else and as such works better with low intelligence or low wisdom characters.

Good characters might simply think all orcs smell bad, or all gnome's are insane. Evil ones might want to create a racially pure world. I have seen games built entirely around these issues.

As a rule I always ask the gm when joining a game about racial prejudice in his world unless playing in a setting like Eberron where it is already laid out.

I am actually playing in a game where one PC, a dwarf, was very abusive towards the two half-Orcs as well as those of Elven blood. The player claimed he was just playing the character, but it quickly got tiresome as he seemed to delight in just being nasty for the sake of being nasty.

It was pointed out to him that it was unrealistic to expect a bunch of strangers to want to work with him on an adventure if he was going to be so spiteful all of the time but he didn't seem to understand. It got pretty heated but has now been resolved - player quit and PC got knifed in the back by a goblin!

In reply to Jarodemo (msg # 39):

So the party Rouge was a goblin? Sounds like a great guy.

In reply to ShadoPrism (msg # 37):

I believe that Tall Fellows are "elve friends", which makes one ask the question what does it mean if crossing halfling with humans changes nothing?

Or the hair-foots (I think that was their name) were inherently the ones who co-mingled with the human genetics.  Perhaps there was no 'true-blood' halfling.

well no true blood halflings anymore is more likely

Which would Mean all Halflings are Half Something.  That really makes you think.

Ah, the old AD&D 1st Ed Racial Preferences table - that Dwarf was quite right - he should have been Antipathetic to the Elves and strongly Hated the Half-Orcs (mind you, the best the poor old Half-Orcs could hope for was the Neutrality of Halflings and Humans).

Though since the feeling is mutual and Elves and Half-Orcs are Antipathetic towards each other too, it's surprising the group ever got together in the first place.  Unless for a three-way fight ! <grins>

Probably why the table was dropped in later editions.  Doesn't exactly promote party (/player) harmony or working together in a good cause (gold is a good cause).

Generally in-game, familiarity from adventuring for a time, combined with fighting and bleeding together, tends to soften attitudes.  Gimli and Legolas didn't get off to a good start but were firm friends by the end.

In reply to TinyTim (msg # 40):

Sadly not. We got ambushed while we were arguing!!!

Which is why party members with any sense don't pick on each other during because another name for a noisy party is "groceries".
 The problem is not that he was roleplaying bigotry but he was roleplaying suicide.

In reply to Skald (msg # 45):

As were Bruenor and Drizz't.  Not the best of friends in the very beginning, but at the end, Bruenor would defend the Dark Elf with his life.

Racial hatreds in a game can add spice to a game, but it takes ALL the players in a group understanding this, not just 1 or 2 of the players.
This message was last edited by the user at 19:13, Sat 21 Mar 2015.

I suspect in most cases a half blood is going to get the worst of both worlds when it comes to first impressions like the Racial preferences table.  Even though local law might say otherwise.
  There is a line of thought in my campaign area among some sages that "Humans are humans, no matter the taint of blood". Which means means that aasimar, and other planetouched are Human.   You may have political law saying one thing, while social law says another.
  On certain temple, high noble and royal high-ways there are separate Road Paxs [peace], enforced by the Order-knights of The Traveler, where even enemies at war must stand down.

My favorite fraction-breed is one I play in a current Pathfinder game.

Her grandmother on her mother's side is a tiefling (half infernal demon).
Her grandfather on her mother's side is a human.

Her mother is 1/4 demon, 3/4 human.
Her father is a fire elemental (don't ask.)

So my character is 1/2 fire elemental, 3/8 human, 1/8 demon.

I made her an Ifrit. :)