Whenever I see a fantasy mixed-race character they always seem to have one of each parent, so a half-Orc had a human mother and an Orc father, and so on. Why is this? Why does nobody seem to have a half-Orc who's parents were both half-Orcs, and grandparents were all half-Orcs...

In the real world there are plenty of people who are of mixed race and who have parents who are mixed race as well, so why should it be different in fantasy worlds?

Maybe human genes are more susceptible to mutation and could also be dominant over other creatures when mixed. If that were the case, mating two half- whatevers would produce something more human and could not be considered half anymore.

However, maybe people like being the first generation hybrid because it gives a more dramatic parental situation.

In reply to Jarodemo (msg # 1):

Well, at least Pathfinder, AD&D2 and D&D 3.5 write about half-elves which are children of other half-elves, and I'm only looking at the race chapter in the core books. Half-human couples are rarer than other couples, but I don't think many games forbid half-race to have children with one another.

Beside, the story of two parents of different race having children is probably considered more interesting for writers, like pand3milk said ...

"You're a half orc? You must have had a troubled childhood, full of distrustful neighbors, dealing with constant racism, your parents ostracized, you trying to figure out which world you really belonged to ..."

"Meh, not really. I'm third generation."

In reply to kouk (msg # 4):

hehehe - yeah.
In Forgotten Realms (for example) there is an entire nation that is mostly half elves. So it is conceivable that over time other mixed races could come together and form their own countries to, leading to more mixed parented family's (part ork, dwarf and elf in one person comes to mind).

In reply to Jarodemo (msg # 1):

I'm playing an 1/2 orc right now that's 4th generation 1/2 orc and her parents are a 1/2 orc and a human.

The assumption that seems to lie in many D&D-based games is this:

1) World war has either just begun or is underway.

2) Spillage from 'the other worlds' has occurred, but is either infrequent or kept under wraps.  Though 'now' it is becoming commonplace and must be stopped by heroes.

3) Half-breeds are a recent occurrence (in a commonplace sense) from a love-choice perspective.  While half-breeds have always occurred between races, they have been rarer and 'usually' under less than consenting scenarios.

4) Half-breeds have only recently begun (see above) to receive enough acceptance to actually gather and thus find each other (support groups aren't exactly a common thing in a fantasy milieu.)

That first one, I have not seen it before in any D&D games I have played in. (Wars between countries yes, whole world no.) Otherwise what you have fits to some degree GamerHandle.

In reply to ShadoPrism (msg # 8):

That is probably a better clarification.  I will restate it to this:

1) War is beginning or underway across the entire world, though in varying degrees.  Typically two countries will be 'paired off' as rivals like some sort of high school sports concept.  Thus not a world war-  but war throughout the world.

Maybe human genetics are dominant, so that a 1/2 orc x 1/2 orc = 1/4 orc. And that's basically just an ugly dude.

Never know, maybe a 1/4 ork is an incredibly hansom person (the ugly goes so far around they come out good looking)

In reply to ShadoPrism (msg # 11):

Yeah, maybe he looks human but with good square shoulders and a solid chin, and a luscious mop of thick black hair on his head. :)

I think terminology came about originally because the first D&D games were human-centric, with elves and the lot coming from other places.  In my game, the orcs call the half-orc "half-human," same with the "half elf."  "Mixed breed" or "half-breed" is also an insult they throw around.

With medieval fantasy games, it's funny how our people tend to be so accepting, when in reality, racism was a huge problem (and not even considered by them to be a problem).  Lineage (from Europe and England to Japan) was also a huge area of discrimination.

So I definitely seeing this as an area of almost untapped roleplay by "enlightened" characters who band together in otherwise socially unacceptable groups.

In reply to Heath (msg # 13):

*chuckle* - you make an excellent and somewhat funny (if a bit morbid) point.

In that sense - Bands of Adventurers: despite being somewhat genocidal, are almost clearly the most 'accepting' persons in a typical fantasy campaign.

"Kill on sight" racism tends to limit the majority of campaigns if it's the norm.

"Discriminate just short of 'kill on sight'" tends to get old for the player(s) if the game was supposed to be relatively "traditional" adventuring.

That's why racism tends to be mildly annoying to nonexistent.


Plus, who's going to be blatantly offensive to a big green guy with a greataxe just 'cause he's got a weird face?

most fantasy type games tend to be very racist but its mostly pointed at the 'humanoid' races such as orks, goblins and the like.
Some of the better written worlds will have individuals who don't like others based on race (humans who don't like elves, or elves as a whole not liking the lesser short lived races (ie everyone else) and such are not really all that uncommon. But the average adventuring group rarely see's this side of things as they are to busy beating up people and stealing their stuff - mostly from those before mentioned Humanoid races which they see as sub human and there for ok to kill cause they are all 'monsters'.

Now it gets interesting if you drop a group of Evolved persons in to such a world. They know that racism is wrong and that judging a whole people based on such or on the actions of a few is wrong - the experiment here is to see how much (if any) such a group could change the worlds status quo.

In my prefered version of half orc, orcs are actually half breeds of the goblinfolk.. ie like a cross between a hobgoblin and a bugbear etc. While or s breed true (mostly) if you put a small colony of orcs on a planet in the end you would have the whole goblinfolk nation.  A half orc is the child of a human and any of the goblin folk including orc. Most take after there human side and that is the standard half orc. About One of ten take after the goblinfolk side, which is why occasionally you will find really ugly half or s with gills.
This message was last edited by the user at 02:59, Wed 18 Mar 2015.

Technically, these are not interbreeding races of a single specie, they are interbreeding species of the same genus. In the real world, interbreeding species generally give rise to sterile offspring - eg mules.

Half-orcs and half-elves, realistically, would almost certainly be unable to breed with one another.

Not that anybody will be interested in the science... :-/

Not actually true. Male hybrids of animals are almost always sterile. Females aren't.
And after a few backcrosses you can get fertile males with traces of the other species' genetics as well.

Also, the shared universe of Earthdawn and Shadowrun explicitly made humans, elves, orcs, dwarves, and trolls a single species. On the other side, "half-" phenotypes do not seem to occur there. The kid turns out as one race or another in full.

Historically, I think it was more about harassing on sight.  Those perceived as lesser races could be stolen from and abused with impunity, even enslaved.  Unless people were pirates, I think killing would have been looked on as an act of savagery, odd as that sounds, just as killing a dog just for being a dog might be considered cruel today.  Of course, each society has its own mores, and with power came privilege (for example, the right of the samurai to kill in the name of their daimyou).

Also, for fantasy campaigns, most races have a god in their own image.  So, for example, the elven race may think that a half-elf (or half-human) can justifiably be looked down on as a blemish and insult to their deity (like some of us might look at genetic code manipulation). The humans and other races might do the same.

I once had a player who aptly played the race superiority thing with his dwarf.  When one party member "Halfling" suggested that halflings and dwarves might share common ancestors many generations back, the dwarf player went on a violent rampage against the Halfling, creating a very memorable moment and breaking some furniture too.

The question is can a "race", ie kobold, orc, trog, be evil.. If it is so, then why.

Picture a race B where all members get fifty percent motivation from pleasure fifty from pain.  In humans positive reinforcement is actually more effective.. anyway.  Race B is more like humans, now picture another race "C".  Race C gains 75+ percent motivation from pleasure (they understand the "good" things in life, and personal relationships).  Now picture their counter part these gain 75+ percent motivation from pain.  Picture the difference in the societies these races create.  Picture demons as a race that gains no motivation at all from pleasure, and angels gaining none from pain.  These groups may intellectually know that others are differently motivated, but how important is it to one to make use of this knowledge.

Beyond that is suppose not all in the society are one reinforcement percentage, you could have some thirty percent of the races Society balanced, while the rest wander into Good or Evil.  A race may have balanced members, but the vast majority far off balanced to one direction.

Now the party may have an Aristocrat/Sage with them that can explain this to them.. but what good (pun) intended will this do them if they know that if they are captured by the trogs they will be eaten.


edit spelling
This message was last edited by the user at 19:59, Fri 20 Mar 2015.

In reply to Heath (msg # 20):

I know, but that's the extreme end. Kill on sight for any and all orc-tainted creatures is something you can expect if you go to a dwarf city fanatically at war with the local orcs for a thousand years. The half-orc PC is probably going to have to be careful.

If that were the campaign norm though, it would get pretty old for the party, so not every town in the world is like that (or the GM should disallow half-orcs in the first place as a PC race).

Racism is an interesting topic in fantasy games. In the game (human-dominated) I am running half-Orcs experience racism as they are regarded as big stupid lumps only fit for certain types of labour. They typically end up in unpleasant, menial and low-paid employment. Their prescence is accepted but not enjoyed by the human majority.

Another race (believed to be descended from demons) are very rare so are met with a mix of curiosity, revulsion and fear. Most humans are too civilised to attack them, but an angry mob might target them as the perceived cause of their misfortune. I guess this would be the same way that a medieval witch might be viewed, or even first sightings of a black person in early Western Europe.

Most people have a natural fear of the unknown. Exposure leads to understanding, and understanding leads to acceptance (hopefully).

In reply to kouk (msg # 23):

Yes, war changes normal behaviors and brings out extremes, particularly a tolerance for killing.  Interestingly, it also brings out a much higher probability for half-breeds as the result of...shall we say...the spoils of war.

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. :)