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Message: <blockquote data-quote="DEFCON 1" data-source="post: 8840006" data-attributes="member: 7006">I am not familiar with this statement or where/who it might have been made... but I don't doubt someone could have made it.  I personally suspect that Tharashk originally was made to encompass Humans in addition to Half-Orcs in 3.5 because Orcs themselves were not considered a "playable race" as such at the time, and the writers might have thought the House wouldn't get enough play if it was Half-Orc alone.  So giving it to Half-Orcs and Humans (and some Orcs NPCs) made sure the mark and the House would gain a bit of traction.  Thus once that was established it would make sense someone would try to justify the "dual race" marking by suggesting the idea that the "Humans" were just Half-Orcs from enough generations back.The funny part of course being that we don't have a similar "dual race" mark for either of the two half-elf Houses.  Because half-elves were always more popular than half-orcs in the playerbase, the need to "boost" their playing numbers by saying Medani and Lyrandar could have humans and/or elves also with those marks was unnecessary (and in fact the setting tried to get across the idea that at this point "half-elves" were in fact a true-breeding race called Khoravar.)  It doesn't make a whole lot of in-world sense to me why one of the half-races has both "parent races" as part of their ability to have a mark... and yet the other one doesn't.  And it gets into the whole thing about trying to demarcate these specific two half-races as the only "real ones" in the game (via mechanics and special write-ups) with all the other potential interracial relationships being just swept under the rug as "Well, they are more connected to X or Y parent race, but we aren't going to bother really dealing with it."At this point in the game (and within Eberron especially, as they are a setting where so-called "racial purity" is a major driving force in a predominant part of the world)... I personally would want to go either way fully on the idea of interracial parenting-- either make every parental combination of race as highlighted and explicit as half-elves and half-orcs are... or else move half-elves and half-orcs into the sub-race category like OneD&D did in their first playtest packet.  Because this "these two half-races are important enough to write about but every other one isn't"... kinda blows in my opinion.</blockquote>

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