Bilogical Tree of D&D creatures

[ptolemy18]

Uh, ladies & gents, let's not let Driddle's comment segue into a discussion of real-world religion, please. I'm reasonably sure it wasn't meant to, given the context, and it's a thread about trying to come up with a biological classification for a fantasy setting, so let's keep it in that venue.

You're right and I'm sorry for taking the bait! I couldn't find this thread for awhile and I was worried it had been banned... (whew!).

Here's how the biological/religious system works out in my current campaign (a sort of heavily modified TESTAMENT mishmash).

The world superficially resembles our own circa 100 BC. There are five "true" gods in the universe, although only a few people know which ones are true and which ones are false. Most of the pantheons (like the Egyptian, Hindu, Chinese and Greek pantheons) are populated entirely by "false" gods, which are really powerful (they even *think* they're gods), but are actually merely ancestral or nature spirits who have ascended to a state of power.

The "true" gods, however, actually arranged the creation of the world, and so they were involved in the creation of the creatures.

"God"
Father/Air God
Created human beings, orcs, elves and giants (which are all distantly related).

Cybele
Mother/Earth Goddess
Created goblins, gnomes, dwarves, halflings and related human-ish creatures which can't actually breed with humans. (These are her attempts to create humanlike creatures.) Also has a demigod/split personality which mutates & combines creatures, creating things like chimeras, etc.

Leviathian-Apophis
Water God(dess)
Created all the reptiles, fish and amphibians: lizard men, sahuagin, kuo-toa, bullywugs, hydras, dragons.

Angra-Mainyu
God of Nothingness/Evil
Created all undead and most "negative energy" beings.

Ahura-Mazda
God of Fire/Good
I'm not really sure what he created. Maybe some celestials, or maybe nothing but fire elementals, if I want the campaign to be depressingly tilted against him...

Normal plants & animals sort of arose spontaneously from creation (although Cybele pays the most attention to them). Most demons & devils are sort of freelance evil beings which dwell on the outskirts of creation, while others work for Angra-Mainyu.

Obviously this is a very variant setting, but that's what I'm working with...

Jason

 

[ptolemy18]

Driddles comment does raise an interest point about how a DnD Taxonomy could be created. Carl Linnaeus was a Lutheran and his Kingdom-Genus-Species system is derived from the Biblical 'Theory of Kinds' (ie God created each plant and animal according to its own Kind) (eg Lions and Tigers and the same Kind (Genus) of animal but with different adaptive characteristics (Species), Domestic Cats are a different Kind). The difficulty comes when you extend this basic theory along evolutionary lines (which Linnaeus never did, because evolution hadn't been invented. ie the basic Linnaeus model is NOT an Evolutionary taxonomy))

Good point and a good sample taxonomy for D&D purposes!!!

I remember reading in the RUNEQUEST books that "species" per se didn't exist in that setting (presumably explaining all the weird crossbreeds that existed). I'm not exactly sure what this means practically, but maybe for standard Greyhawk-D&D terms it'd be easier to say that something is human-*like*, goblin-*like*, dragon-*like*... which, of course, is how it works in the MONSTER MANUAL.

Jason

 

[Gwarthkam]

You can make a biological graph, but it won't be a tree. (A tree is a special kind of graph where there is only one path from the source (root) to any particular end (leaf).)

Technically a 'Tree' is a non-rooted Graph of Operational Taxonomic untis (OTUs), it may appear rooted, but until an Outgroup is assigned, it is not. In cladistics, a rooted OTU-graph would more commonly be refered to as a Phylogeny