Rethinking Fantasy Races - Hybrid Theory

Rethinking Fantasy Races - Slaughtering Your Sacred Minotaurs

We're taking a break from our usual revamps in order to address a pretty big elephant in the room. Hybrids.

Half-elves and half-orcs have been a staple of the genre for a long time. But why just those two? If it's a peculiar quirk of Human genetics, shouldn't we have half-dwarves, half-gnomes, three-quarterlings, et cetera?

Maybe elves, humans, and orcs are just more closely related than some of the other races. Maybe dwarves, gnomes, and halflings fit on their own branch of reproductive compatibility.

Of course, half-ogres and orogs are a thing. That would mean that ogres are more closely related to elves than halflings. Hobbits (the OG halflings) were supposed to have been a subrace of men in Middle Earth.

It's an awful muddled mess. There's no consistency. No pattern. No direction.

The simplest answer is to just say that hybrids are simply not viable, or so rarely viable as to be campfire stories. That's a cop-out decision, though.

So, we can try to establish some general rules. Easy stuff, like things need to be within one size category to be viable. I don't even want to think about the awfulness of a halfling/ogre hybrid.

We could simply say that if it's a humanoid, it can crossbreed, but it somehow feels wrong for a lizardfolk and a human to produce viable offspring. So let's say oviparous and viviparous species are incompatible.

Also, I'm going to be exploring a different (Magic? Technological?) evolutionary path for the "beast races", so let's just say that any race with animalistic features will be biologically incompatible with "standard races". (I have no idea what kobolds should fall under. They don't have an easily defined animalistic origin like catfolk or vanara. Headaches.)

Let's also say that races with the same racial subtype are at least partially compatible. Elves and Dark Elves should be able to produce a child, as should Dwarves and Duergar, etc.

That still gives us a massive range of possible hybrids.

We'll definitely still need to come up with...a chart? I don't know.

I guess, in the spirit of the game, I could just randomly roll reproductive compatibility. That might lead to some legitimately interesting evolutionary history.

As far as the offspring, there's also a lot to consider.

Do we want reciprocal hybrids to exist (ligers/tigons, mules/hinnies, et cetera)? If so, that complicates things further. Reciprocal hybrids tend strongly toward infertility. The interesting quirk of that is Haldane's rule. Certain hybrids are infertile in one gender with the other being fully (usually partially) fertile. This is always the gender with two of the same chromosomes, so in mammals this means that female hybrids are more commonly fertile than males.

What about the reproductive viability of these hybrids? I very much do not want to get into possible racial traits for a quarter elf/quarter orc/half human. The easy answer is to say that all hybrids are infertile. Another cop-out decision. I feel more comfortable with hybrids having restricted viability. So a half-elf would be reproductively viable with elves, half-elves, and humans, but nothing else. That, at least, carries on some genetics and it saves me getting into all the details of numbers of chromosomes and other bioscience that I only have a basic academic knowledge of.

As far as the further breedings, there's always the "One Drop" rule that we could consider, though I don't really care for it. If a hybrid race produces child, that child will just be the hybrid. In the above example, it wouldn't matter if the half-elf mated with an elf, half-elf, or human. The result would always be a half-elf.

So, if this is the case, wouldn't the entire world eventual become these half-races, unable to breed with any other race? I mean, potentially, yeah. This is something even Darwin struggled with. A potential answer is koinophilia.

Koinophilia is, essentially, the natural draw to the thing that is most similar to you. Biological imperative wants you to breed with the most perfect example of your species that you can. Proto-dwarves, therefore, would instinctually have avoided proto-elves because their long spindly limbs would seem weak and fragile. That same instinct carries over even into civilized society. Because early evolution is propelled by the need for survival and propagation, it's just very unlikely to happen. Certainly, there are going to be dwarves that are attracted to elves, but they'll always be biological outliers. The majority of dwarves are going to be attracted to dwarves. Other races are generally going to be too tall, too short, too thin, not enough body hair, can't see in the dark, gods why do they dance so much, et cetera.

All this is to say one thing:

I just don't know.

I've written a lot of words and come to very few conclusions. I suppose, for now, I'll just push hybrids to the background.

I'm not happy about it, but I don't really see a path forward right now. Let me know what you think.

Until next time.