Evolutionary Fantasy

[Tonguez]

This pic is pure awesome. What's the source?

I got the image from theage.com

While I'm at to go evolutionary on abberations and oozes you could declare them to be Megaforms of Ameoba, Protozoans and similar, the ambient magical feild allowing them to reach prodigious size

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Multiple intelligent species might work best if the world has smaller continents so we can look to Australia as a model; elves originally come from this one small island chain to Hell and gone across the ocean and really only have 'colonies' in the main campaign area. Dwarves come from that isolated northen ice-hell continent that's only half myth. They and other species never had to compete with anyone else for space or resources before.

I think this is one way this could work.

Here's Another:

Magic as an evolutionary force actually favors the creation of intelligence.

Just as the predator-prey exigency in our world favors the creation of multiple species and evolutionary trends with running and even pack tactics as a strategy.

So in the DnD-verse the presence of magic actually creates a broad based incentive for species to develop intelligence.

Humans might be the only species that developed intelligence not as a response to magic and its role in creation but as a basic survival strategy involving the weirdness of gathering fruit, living in groups, and going out onto the plains. As we actually did in our history.

Humans might discover they have a talent for magic, but they did not evolve as a result of competition within the use of magic.

This helps explain why humans lack the traits of most other intelligent heavy magic using species such as extremely long life, better night vision, and a higher level of cultural homogeniety.

Now the challenge is explaining why magic enforces those traits in species as diverse as Elves, Dragons, and Illithid or Beholders.

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

In my present campaign, I have "Philosophers", who are mechanically identical to clerics, but are militantly atheistic. They can even turn and destroy undead, by rationally demonstrating that there are no such things as ghosts or zombies!

I'm not toting an ideology here, but how is demonstrating that a thing doesn't exist when it clearly does, particularly as you are conducting the demonstration as a means of acting against the thing before you, qualify as rational behavior?

 

[Dr. Strangemonkey]

Sorry, no more chain posts I swear.

It might be fun to consider alternate ideas about heredity and evolution other than the standard "genetic" explanations.

For example, what if changes to the body and mind during life could be inherited? Cripple a man, and the children he sires later on will be born with weak limbs. Put some curse on him, and the curse will be inherited. On the other hand, if you make a women beautiful through a spell or alchemy, her children will also inherit that beauty.

Such things could explain many "dark races" - they are descended from humans who were brutally tortured and stunted until their descendants reached their current appearance. Owlbears, gryphons, and other hybrid races could be the result of someone grafting animal parts on different animals. And so on...

This could be an interesting dynamic for one way in which magic works as an evolutionary force.

Perhaps this occurs as a component of adopting magic into your process of sexual selection. Intelligence thus becomes a means of manipulating this process.

Dragons could thus be super sexual selectors within the limits of sex-magic. This has a four fold effect:

1.) They can breed with anything as long as they get the ritualized aspects right.

2.) They can preserve, edit, and transmit an astonishing number of magic traits. Draconic reproduction is amazingly difficult but also incredibly successful on levels our primitive idea of sexual reproduction and selection can't even envision.

3.) When they get it really right they can produce tailor made children. Thus Bahumut and Tiamat aren't gods, they are actual progenitors of whole lines of draconic awesomeness. Sexual craftsmen par-excellence.

4.) Insane things: Maybe dragons are able to pick up traits from children. Swallow memories and magical capability. Meditate their way into advantageous traits. And so on and so forth.



Go mad with this:

Make Dragons the most succesful plants in history. Things which were around at the initial emergence of animals, and which have been selecting the very best traits from the animals around them and the things that happened to them ever since.

Dragons aren't a dying species, they're a rare and deliberate, at this point, meta species. Theoretically a dragon that went to another world and found even a bit of life and the right material to frame the magic could reproduce whole ecologies.

Possibly - you could kill the last dragon and under the right magical circumstances their genes would reformat themselves from the Bacterial and viral layers and just start making dragons out of the best local wombs or forests.

Possibly - Your setting doesn't have gods, but given enough time Dragons would actually get there.

Possibly - It's not going to be trans-humanism, it has always and already been trans-dragonism.

 

[Orius]

I take a partial approach in my campaign background. Humans and very similar humanoids (elves, dwarves, halflings, orcs and the golblinoids), all came from the same basic genetic stock. Over a million years ago in the past, the ancient races like illithids, beholders and the like enslaved the proto-humans, and performed all sorts of genetic experiments on them, invoving both magic and alien sciences. The races of the current world eventually evolved into their seperate forms. I use a timeline of about a million years given the timespan involved in evolution in the real world. All the warm-blooded humanoids originated from genetic experimentation from sapient cold-blooded and invertebrate species in the past, although they all have creation myths that tell how the were created by their gods.

As for the ancient races, they were created by their gods, though their histories are very very vague. For a scientific origin, the idea is that they were bio-engineered by the Elder Gods. The Elder Gods themselves are from the Far Realm, and shaped the known universe. For a scientific explanation of that, I kind of dip into (what little I know of) string theory and figure that they're very powerful extra terrestrial beings from another dimension, and I'm not even going to bother trying to explain their origin. Just thinking about stuff like 11 dimensions and superstrings and branes makes my head hurt. In any case, the Far Realm in this conception is a vast reality beyond the known universe, and the universe is only a small part of its entire reality.

Besides, in a world that has clearly supernatural elements, I'm a bit inclined to do a bit of hand having anyway.