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<blockquote data-quote="James Gasik" data-source="post: 8821665" data-attributes="member: 6877472">I was just talking with some friends about a late 90's JRPG, Xenogears.&nbsp; Basically, a gigantic spaceship, the Eldridge, crash lands on an unknown planet, and ten thousand years later, the protagonists are trying to deal with an ancient conspiracy and an even more ancient superweapon.&nbsp; It is revealed later in the game that all of the &quot;humans&quot; in the game were actually created by a computer, and are not actually descended from survivors of the crash at all; they are part of a millennia-long project to rebuild the aforementioned superweapon, which is (in part) the explanation for why they have unusual abilities, including what passes for &quot;magic&quot; in the game. Further, even the game's &quot;save points&quot; are in-universe constructs that record the memories of humans, so that the puppet masters (well, some of them) can keep tabs on the great experiment.If you were to create a Xenogears 5e game, the players would be humans...but at the same time, they also wouldn't.&nbsp; This extends to D&amp;D as well; not all Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halfings, Humans, etc. across the various campaign settings have the same origins.&nbsp; What we call an &quot;Elf&quot; on Eberron might be mechanically similar to one from Greyhawk, or Krynn, but may not be related in the slightest.Certainly, Corellon Larethian and the other members of the Seldarine are not worshipped on Krynn, so it seems very likely that the Elves of Krynn are not, in fact, the same race (who were created by Corellon, mind.&nbsp; Or, for another example, Eberron doesn't even necessarily have Gods in the same way other settings do, and certainly has no Araushnee/Lolth, but definitely has Drow!).&nbsp; This extends to Humans as well; there is no reason to suppose that a D&amp;D Human is actually a member of homo sapiens sapiens, and they might be so genetically different that they cannot interbreed (assuming D&amp;D has DNA at all)!&nbsp; Now that's a plot twist I'd like to see in an isekai story!TLDR: what's in a name?&nbsp; That which we call Humans might not be people like us at all!-Though in all fairness, in the Forgotten Realms, at least, Humans are heavily implied to be from our Earth (or maybe the other way around!), due to ancient contact between Toril and our planet.</blockquote>

[QUOTE="James Gasik, post: 8821665, member: 6877472"] I was just talking with some friends about a late 90's JRPG, Xenogears. Basically, a gigantic spaceship, the [I]Eldridge[/I], crash lands on an unknown planet, and ten thousand years later, the protagonists are trying to deal with an ancient conspiracy and an even more ancient superweapon. It is revealed later in the game that all of the "humans" in the game were actually created by a computer, and are not actually descended from survivors of the crash at all; they are part of a millennia-long project to rebuild the aforementioned superweapon, which is (in part) the explanation for why they have unusual abilities, including what passes for "magic" in the game. Further, even the game's "save points" are in-universe constructs that record the memories of humans, so that the puppet masters (well, some of them) can keep tabs on the great experiment. If you were to create a Xenogears 5e game, the players would be humans...but at the same time, they also wouldn't. This extends to D&D as well; not all Elves, Dwarves, Gnomes, Halfings, Humans, etc. across the various campaign settings have the same origins. What we call an "Elf" on Eberron might be mechanically similar to one from Greyhawk, or Krynn, but may not be related in the slightest. Certainly, Corellon Larethian and the other members of the Seldarine are not worshipped on Krynn, so it seems very likely that the Elves of Krynn are not, in fact, the same race (who were created by Corellon, mind. Or, for another example, Eberron doesn't even necessarily have Gods in the same way other settings do, and certainly has no Araushnee/Lolth, but definitely has Drow!). This extends to Humans as well; there is no reason to suppose that a D&D Human is actually a member of [I]homo sapiens sapiens[/I], and they might be so genetically different that they cannot interbreed (assuming D&D has DNA at all)! Now that's a plot twist I'd like to see in an [I]isekai[/I] story! TLDR: what's in a name? That which we call Humans might not be people like us at all! -Though in all fairness, in the Forgotten Realms, at least, Humans are heavily implied to be from our Earth (or maybe the other way around!), due to ancient contact between Toril and our planet. [/QUOTE]

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