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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Lanefan" data-source="post: 6775195" data-attributes="member: 29398">It's questions like this (among many others) which I was so hoping the d20-era Book of Erotic Fantasy would give useful coherent answers to.  Oh the disappointment...I had this sort of thing happen in my current campaign, in fact: an originally-female (human) character had been permanently changed to male and kept finding ways to temporarily change back to female; which usually lasted as long as it took for her to get hit with a Dispel Magic.  However, during one of her temporarily-female phases she got pregnant; whereupon I quietly ruled to myself she would remain female no matter what until the pregnancy ended via any means be it her death, an abortion, coming to term, or whatever.  Well, despite adventuring in the field for 6 of her 9 months she made it to full term and on giving birth almost immediately reverted to male...no breastfeeding for you, kid...which she'd otherwise have done some months prior.But polymorph on someone already pregnant, or becoming pregnant while polymorphed (the latter is highly unlikely in my game as polymorph spells have a much lower duration than forever), is a can o' worms I'd never considered before.For the sake of simplicity and sanity I think if a polymorph hit someone already pregnant I'd rule the fetus would go with the mother - turn a pregnant human into a dwarf and you get a pregnant dwarf carrying a dwarf child - and if birth somehow happened during the polymorph duration the spell would continue to affect both as if simultaneously cast on each; thus here a dwarf baby would be born and when the mother turned back to a human the baby would change with her.  I'd also rule that a pregnant female could (usually*) only be polymorphed into a female, to preserve the pregnancy. (which means abortion, otherwise perfectly accepted in my world, cannot be achieved via a polymorph-return cycle)  If the polymorph is to something that does not normally become pregnant as such, e.g. a salmon, I'd probably say the fetus is lost but it would almost certainly be a moot point as chances are extremely high that such polymorph is being done in order to kill the mother anyway.The more frequent example of this sort of thing is shapeshifting Nature Clerics (Druids); here I've already ruled the fetus changes in lockstep, and as birth cannot happen while shapeshifted and as the shapeshift is controlled by the Druid she can and will - and must - change to her normal form in order to give birth.  Shapeshifting cannot change one's gender, so that headache doesn't happen; and I only allow them to shapeshift into ordinary animals or birds - I can deal with a pregnant bird instead of an egg-laying one for this purpose.* - except when polymorphing into an Orc; I have Orcs change gender on the fly somewhat randomly anyway as a product of their whacked-out biology, and in this case a male CAN be pregnant.Another area where I have already thought over this sort of thing is if a pregnant character dies and is revived, what happens to the fetus?  What I do is give the mother a saving throw on revival if such is done by Raise Dead (use of this spell implies both that the corpse is pretty much whole and hasn't been dead all that long) which if successful means the fetus comes back with her; but if revival is via Resurrection (requiring only a bit of the corpse) or by Reincarnation (probably into a different species) the fetus is lost.Lan-"gods can impregnate others while shapeshifted - ordinary mortals, not so much"-efan</blockquote>

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