How does interbreeding work in your campaign?

[Aeolius]

That chart gets tucked away. Thanks. It'll be very useful for running standard games.

Glad to be of service. One of these years I will finalize my notes for "Hagborn", the hagonomicon with all of my notes regarding night hags and their progeny. Until then, My EN World Blogs

 

[prosfilaes]

I've got a copy of Races of Consequence*, a D20 book with crosses for every PHB race. It's interesting, if less then completely inspiring.


* Races of Consequence - Dog Soul Publishing | Louis Porter, Jr. Design, Inc.

 

[Ulrick]

Sometimes things get explosive...

[ame]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vbXzpoH6m2c[/ame]

 

[C_M2008]

As a believer in simplicity I'd keep it simple (this has never actually come up in one of our games).

I wouldn't get into subraces or non PC races.

I'd do this so that the hybrid offspring can choose which of it's heritages to follow, and that would be the race it counts as.

 

[Pheonix0114]

In my campaign world only humans can mate with other races, part of how they were made. And these offspring breed true. This mechanic let me explain many of the worlds races without having to give them lengthy origins. Also, human hybrids can mate, and this usually makes either 1) A human, 2) The same sub-race as one of the parents, or 3) Rarely a new race. Our current campaign has just such a character, a shifter tiefling hybrid that I dubbed an Infernal Shifter.

 

[Jimlock]

A blend of an elf with a F-16

 

[Stormonu]

I'll just throw in the original minotaur myth for a crossbreed that just shows that if you want you can mix and match any creature combination you want and half-justify it.

For my own campaign world, I've used these crossbreeds:

Dwarf + Elf = gnome
Orc + Elf = goblin
Demon + human = Rosemary's baby


In my world, dragons don't necessarily crossbreed; the magic in their blood, when ingested can cause offspring to have dragon-like qualities (though the duration of the potency is generally short). Sometimes dragons purposely spill their blood to create servant creatures, other times it's accidental or incidental. One tale speaks of a dragonslayer, who after slaying a vile, ancient and evil wyrm accidentally ingested some blood while wiping his face after the combat. After celebrating his victorious return back in town, the maiden of his affections conceive a monstrous draconic offspring that too had be hunted down and destroyed.

 

[Lanefan]

Hybrids:
Half-Elf + Human = 75% Elf-blooded Human, 25% Half-Elf
Half-Elf + Half-Elf = 25% Human-blooded Elf, 50% Half-Elf, 25% Elf-blooded Human.

Thank you for being the first other person I've seen on these boards to even mention the idea of hybrids!

The difference in my system is a half-elf + half-elf would give another half-elf.

A half-elf + a half-orc, however, would give 25% elf, 50% human, 25% orc. And see below...

A lo-ong time ago I sat down and spread out a huge piece of paper on a table, then spent the afternoon drawing out a massive chart in an attempt to figure out just what could breed with what. The result looked like a plate of spaghetti with all the lines connecting different races, but dammit, it worked; and I use it to this day.

In this case, using the real world to go by is kind of pointless - in the standard D+D world there's too many races/species too genetically close to each other; there's magic; and there's deities and shapeshifters. Put 'em all together and you have a mess that the real world just doesn't.

Back to hybrids. In our game they're not half-x's but "part-x's"; we break it down to 1/8ths. So, you can be a part-orc anywhere from 1/8 to 7/8 orcish; ditto for part-elves; and we've broken down the stat modifiers to suit each degree.

What this also opens up the door to is racial taints. After I did the big plate-of-spaghetti chart I also dreamed up taints tables; at roll-up you can, if you like, roll d% - on anything particularly high you've got some sort of taint in your racial background. Most of the time this is irrelevant - someone with a bit of Tabaxi in their background might have fingernails a bit longer and tougher than usual that become slightly claw-like if not trimmed - but occasionally someone might go nuts on the taint tables and come out with something truly wacko. Best one I ever saw - I forget what race this character was originally going to be, but by the time its player got done butchering the taints tables she had a half-Skulk, half-Frostman!

Another character had silver eyes, courtesy of being 1/16 genie.

In one of my games a Human and a Hobbit - both were PCs in an active party - got together between adventures and ended up having a baby not long after...

So, going back to my example above, if that 25-50-25 elf-human-orc were to reproduce with a human, the kids would be 1/8-6/8-1/8. Were any of those kids to then reproduce with a human the grandkids would be considered human but tainted with both elf and orc. And so on...

Lan-"pure as the driven slush"-efan

 

[Celebrim]

What this also opens up the door to is racial taints. After I did the big plate-of-spaghetti chart I also dreamed up taints tables; at roll-up you can, if you like, roll d% - on anything particularly high you've got some sort of taint in your racial background. Most of the time this is irrelevant - someone with a bit of Tabaxi in their background might have fingernails a bit longer and tougher than usual that become slightly claw-like if not trimmed - but occasionally someone might go nuts on the taint tables and come out with something truly wacko. Best one I ever saw - I forget what race this character was originally going to be, but by the time its player got done butchering the taints tables she had a half-Skulk, half-Frostman!

I'm pretty sure I don't go as far as you do, but in my game things like 'Elf Blood' and 'Human Blood' are Traits that you can use to customize their character. Since every starting character gets a free trait as well as a free feat, you tend to see a lot of wacky characters from certain players who are in to that thing.

One of my players is currently playing a fey blooded hobgoblin. Rather than dipping into Fanatic for the Rage ability, he dipped into the Feyborn class to gain Enlarge Self. The result is essentially a half-hobgoblin half-spriggan. No word from the player exactly how that came about. I suspect the Spriggan had had a bit too much whiskey.

But if you really want to get crazy bizarre in my games, you play Sorcerer and take something like Vermin Bloodline (one of your anscestors was an insect or perhaps you got yourself messed up in some magical experimentation). You could then by the end of the game be playing something like a walking cockroach if that was your preference.

 

[Dyir]

In my campaign, humans are the only "natural" sapient species and all "natural" species behave like they do in the real world. However, all of the "fantasy" species originate from Faerie, where magic and myth and belief are the rule. As a result, pairings between any two "fantasy" species are viable, as well as any 1 "natural" + 1 "fantasy" pairing. For those pairings that aren't in the rulebooks, I just say that the offspring takes after one parent or another besides a few cosmetic elements from the other parent. Happily, this was also how I let a few PCs play "monster classes" and explain why they didn't automatically have all of their racial abilities: they were still "maturing" into those abilities from that parent.