The Origin of Species--Fantasy Genetics

[PhoenixPhyre]

One secondary goal of my setting (Dawn of Hope) is to find a place for as many of the official 5e D&D player options as possible while still maintaining a coherent setting.

Classes and spells are easy. In fact, I can have those and more without issue. Races, now that's a bit trickier.

To find places, I had to figure out why these bizarre races are all found in the same world. For other reasons, I can't fall back to "a god did it."

So here's what I came up with. Note--this is mostly about the playable races--pure monster races aren't exhaustively listed. I've tried to keep the core psychology of most of these races close to "stock", but the history and sociology is entirely different. For one thing, there are no "mostly X alignment" races. Even dragons, devils, angels, etc.
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Categorizing the types of race by their origin reveals a few basic groups.

Special Creations: these races were made by the Dreamer in the beginning. All races ultimately descend from them (or from the animals that were also created). Powerful beyond the mortal races of today, they suffered greatly in the Dawn War that reshaped the universe. Most of these are either extinct or are hidden away in inaccessible places.
Examples (those marked with * are extinct)
* Titans*
* Wyrm*
* Leviathan
* Light-bound*
* Proteans*

Mortal Descendants: These are the direct offshoots of the special creations. Over time, they've weakened quite a bit (as a consequence of several cosmic changes) and are all mortal except as marked.
Examples (those marked with * are extinct, the arrows show the descent)
*Titans -> Giants (including trolls, ogres, etc), Dwarves, Goliaths
* Wyrm -> Dragons
* Light-bound -> Angels (not mortal), devils (not mortal), fallen deva* (returned to angelic status recently), aelves*
* Proteans -> Goblinoids (all 3 races are one species)
* Aelves -> high elves, wood elves, drow (with some artificial breeding/magical adjustment), shadar-kai (with some planar influence)

First-order Chimerae: These are races created artificially by magically combining goblinoids (as the most mutable race) with other races (using serious magic). They breed true and are quite common, even dominant in some areas.
Examples
* Humans (hobgoblins + high elves, a long time ago). Created by high elves.
* Orcs (hobgoblins + wild boars, contemporaries of humans). Created by wood elves.
* Triton (hobgoblins + fish, unknown provenance. Ancient). Probably created by Leviathan.
* Lizardfolk (hobgoblins + crocodilians, ancient). Probably created by aelves.
* Kenku (goblins + corvids, recent). Created by high elves [1].
* Tortle (goblins + turtles, semi-recent). Created by the order of one insane high-elven emperor [1].
* Halflings (goblins + wild magic). Created spontaneously by wild magic surges due to a massive magical nuclear-equivalent war. Recent.

Second-order Chimerae: These are races created artificially from humans (mostly) in much the same way as humans were created. They also breed true.
Examples
* Tabaxi (humans + cats). Created by high elves [1].
* Githyanki (modified humans, no specific animal--instead they were engineered for certain traits). Created by high elves [1].
* Githzerai (similar to Githyanki, basically a sister species. Interfertile, if they didn't hate each other). Created by high elves [1].
* Dragonborn (humans + dragons). Created by a human empire.
* Aarokocra (humans + birds). Created by high elves [1].

Plane-touched: These are created from a stock race when a strong planar (or fae) influence is involved during conception or pre-natal development. Not usually true interbreeding, although many tieflings and aasimar trace their lineage to such events. They rarely breed true, mainly because they're not present in enough numbers.
Examples
* Genasi (human + elemental)
* Eladrin (elves + fae)
* Firbolg (goliaths + fae)
* Gnomes (goblins + fae)
* Aasimar (human + celestial)
* Tiefling (human + fiend)
* Shifters (human + fae)
* Duergar (dwarves + dark fae--those associated with emotions like hatred, violence, sorrow, loss, anger, etc.). There are other fae-touched dwarves, but they're very rare. Duergar only occur in numbers in a single area due to a more recent historical event.

Artificial: There is one race that doesn't fit these categories--the Soul-forged. They're constructs (either of metal and crystal or wood and stone) that, for some unknown reason, have begun "waking up" and gaining independent souls recently. No one knows why.

Hybrids: The "half" races--half-orc and half-elf are the result of interbreeding between humans + orcs or humans + elves. These are actually spectra--someone with mostly human traits will probably be considered a human. Someone with almost no human traits will be considered an elf (especially among the wood elves, high elves can be snotty about those things). So a "half-elf" is someone who shows a notable mixture of human and elven traits, whether they're exactly 50/50 or not. They breed mostly true with half-elves--adding many human generations will shift them one way, adding many elven generations and they'll shift the other. They can do this because humans (and orcs) are based on the same stock originally, and humans were created by including fragments of elven soul-matter into hobgoblins.

In principle, most of the 1st-order chimerae could probably interbreed, as could 1st and 2nd order. Do they? Not usually, and they tend to be more like one parent than the other and so get lumped in with that one.

[1] One particular empire of high elves has made magical genetic manipulation a specialty. They breed species for specific purposes. Thus, those species are mostly limited to this one continent where this empire is the dominant power, although many have fled captivity.

[JeenLeen]

You might find the "Natural and Supernatural Selection" portion of the instruction manual for Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Sorcery interesting.

The manual is free online here: http://www.sierrahelp.com/Documents/...m_-_Manual.pdf
It's a fun read, as if written by a historian in the setting, going on about how some races were made by magical experimentation and some simply by evolution.

[Max_Killjoy]

It's going to take me a while to really ponder this -- the fantasy kitchen sink is in full effect here, isn't it?

This is a pretty strong contrast to the two WIP settings I've got going, where there are a limited selection of species ("races") that exist within a tight framework. In each case, it's less than 10 total.

In one case, most are interfertile because most are from the same basic origin / act of creation. In the other case, their past interfertility was the result of meddling by the "mad gods of old".

[brian 333]

While I understand the urge to introduce evolution into a fantasy setting, it is a vice to which I have never succumbed. In a setting in which creation is known to be true, it seems to me that any attempt at scientific organization of species is futile. You would keep running into individual acts of creation.

Instead of a Tree of Life you'd have a Lawn of Life with many individual plants, some of which may connect to others by runners. Most of the plants in your Lawn would have blown in on the wind and be wholly unrelated to one another.

[PhoenixPhyre]

It's going to take me a while to really ponder this -- the fantasy kitchen sink is in full effect here, isn't it?

This is a pretty strong contrast to the two WIP settings I've got going, where there are a limited selection of species ("races") that exist within a tight framework. In each case, it's less than 10 total.

In one case, most are interfertile because most are from the same basic origin / act of creation. In the other case, their past interfertility was the result of meddling by the "mad gods of old".

That's true. It's an intentional kitchen sink setting. Offsetting that is the fact that most of these species are quite local and limited in size. For example, humanity (as well as orcs, dragonborn, and many other races) don't exist on the western continents. Those continents split off before humanity was created. All the ones marked [1] in the OP are only found on the south-eastern continent, and those only in small numbers and in local pockets (10-40k max). Heck, there are only about 2 dozen soul-forged anywhere, and the oldest of them is about 5 years old.

The only ones that are really wide-spread are

* wood elves
* dwarves
* giants
* goblinoids

Humans (and many other 1st-order chimerae) are not uncommon, mainly because they were created a long time ago (compared to the others). Halflings are only about 800 years old, and dragonborn are only a tiny bit older (a few decades).

While I understand the urge to introduce evolution into a fantasy setting, it is a vice to which I have never succumbed. In a setting in which creation is known to be true, it seems to me that any attempt at scientific organization of species is futile. You would keep running into individual acts of creation.

Instead of a Tree of Life you'd have a Lawn of Life with many individual plants, some of which may connect to others by runners. Most of the plants in your Lawn would have blown in on the wind and be wholly unrelated to one another.

That's just it. The only one who can create anything truly new is the Dreamer, and he only created the special creation races (and that a long time ago before the dawn of history). Anyone else (or natural forces) can only change what exists, often by shuffling traits together. The only exception is the soul-forged, and that's set quite a few scholars into a tizzy.

The only "evolved" races (the mortal descendants) were changed due to major changes in the metaphysics. Some of these changes were as the result of others activating a relic that basically gives root access to the OS of reality, something that has happened a total of 4 times and always heralds major changes, like cracking continents. Others were as the after-effects of the Dawn War that established the planes as we know them.

Titans and Wyrm degenerated into giant-kin (giants, dwarves, goliaths, etc) and dragon-kin over the course of a decade or so when their magic got hijacked by the ancient aelves, an event that spawned wizardry as a thing. The different races are the result of trying to hold on to different fragments of that magic (runes for the Titans, elemental sorcery for the wyrm). The Light-bound split even earlier, at the end of the Dawn War when the Material Plane got sectioned off. Some were exiles from the Astral, others chose the mortal path willingly. Some chose mortality and then tried to get back to the Astral, producing the shadar-kai when that failed. The Proteans were forcibly degenerated into the goblinoids as a penalty for them being on the losing side of the Dawn War. Since then they've struggled to regain even the basics of normal existence.

Everybody else was a deliberate hybrid (or artificial modification) of another race, usually goblinoid. That's because the goblinoids are a uniquely mutable race (their ancestors were perfect shape-shifters, completely formless and without fixed natures). This is also why the chimerae are interfertile, a remnant of their Protean ancestors.

Only the planar/fae-touched groups don't match this description, and that because those are really just sub-races of others (and are few and far between).

[Knaight]

While I understand the urge to introduce evolution into a fantasy setting, it is a vice to which I have never succumbed. In a setting in which creation is known to be true, it seems to me that any attempt at scientific organization of species is futile. You would keep running into individual acts of creation.

Instead of a Tree of Life you'd have a Lawn of Life with many individual plants, some of which may connect to others by runners. Most of the plants in your Lawn would have blown in on the wind and be wholly unrelated to one another.

Even if creation was known to be true, there's no particular reason to think that you also don't get novel mutations, shifts of allele frequencies within populations, and just evolution generally. Evolution in no way depends on a single origin of life, and there are some good reasons to suspect that life has originated several times (if not necessarily on Earth).

Plus, just because it's a fantasy setting doesn't mean that it must have been created, and even if it was created there's all sorts of options for it being created a long time ago and quite possibly completely dead then left to grow and change.

[PhoenixPhyre]

One important (to me) thing to note is that I don't do "genetics" in the Mendelian sense. DNA isn't a thing in my setting (nor are cells or even atoms as we know them). Instead it's all about souls and compatibility between souls.

This means that the artificial creations aren't a matter of generations-long breeding projects--they're much quicker and much more...well...evil. Either you overlay an individual with the appropriate aspects through ritual/possession during the conception process or you inject fragments of the souls of the desired species into unborn children using blood magic. While this may take many attempts to perfect, it's much faster than the earthly equivalent.

[Max_Killjoy]

In one of the WIP settings, I've left it purposefully vague as to what happened between "creation" and the rise of civilization. The "strange old ones" who are the original "not quite deities" of the world were distracted by their own strange thoughts and priorities for a very long time, and stumbled upon intelligent life almost by accident. If you read between the lines, there's some... parallel (? Allegory? Metaphor?) between the creation story of that world, and a pre-creation singularity ending in a "big bang", stars and planets forming, life arising from simply to complex and then intelligent, etc, but it's never going to be explicitly said, because characters in that world don't know (unless they happen to find one of the less-"insane" old ones and get the whole story, but good luck with that).

The old deities, and their underlings, at times toyed with life and "blessed" living things with interfertility, or conducted strange experiments, for whatever reason, and in those old days the world was a bit more magical place. The fall of the old deities at the hands of current deities ended the days of close interaction between "gods" and "mortals", and also took some of the magic out of the world -- so it's been an age since there was any cross-species mixing worth mentioning.

[PhoenixPhyre]

In one of the WIP settings, I've left it purposefully vague as to what happened between "creation" and the rise of civilization. The "strange old ones" who are the original "not quite deities" of the world were distracted by their own strange thoughts and priorities for a very long time, and stumbled upon intelligent life almost by accident. If you read between the lines, there's some... parallel (? Allegory? Metaphor?) between the creation story of that world, and a pre-creation singularity ending in a "big bang", stars and planets forming, life arising from simply to complex and then intelligent, etc, but it's never going to be explicitly said, because characters in that world don't know (unless they happen to find one of the less-"insane" old ones and get the whole story, but good luck with that).

I've left a lot of gaps in my "creation" story, and most of it is told from the perspective of a very insane person who listened to/participated in the primal memory of Leviathan (basically a collective consciousness of all the deep-sea creatures that endlessly sing their memories stretching back to the creation).

For example, the cause of the Dawn War. We know one being (a Primordial for lack of a better term) opposed 8 others. Why? Asking that question of anyone who might know either leaves the questioner absolutely insane or struck dead. Asking anything even remotely related to that question usually ends up the same way. So scholars (slowly) learned to stop asking that question. Same goes for the fate of the soul, although less "smite"y. There you get answers that are pure gibberish. Or self-contradictory. Or all of the above.

In fact, I only pinned down the origins of species for myself because of a joke (it had been fuzzy before then). I had a character who was portrayed as a stereotypical racist (hating goblins/orcs/etc). At one point they were going through an abandoned research tower and found some documents. Just to tweak the player of this character, I included something about humans being descended from goblins (an unthinkable idea for that character) as a throw-away line. But then it hit me. Using goblins as the primal species for most of the various races explained so much. It fit with how I had characterized goblins, with the history as far as I knew it, etc. And it set up some interesting tensions between groups that thought they were supreme and that others were inferior.

The more I ran with that idea, the more it unfolded. It filled in so many gaps and was so productive an explanation that it quickly became canon.

[Max_Killjoy]

Isn't it funny how the smallest thing can just unfurl into so much, when it comes to the creative process?

For the world you're building, and as an effort to fit as many of the D&D "races" into a coherent whole, you've got a great start there.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Isn't it funny how the smallest thing can just unfurl into so much, when it comes to the creative process?

For the world you're building, and as an effort to fit as many of the D&D "races" into a coherent whole, you've got a great start there.

Yes, yes it is. It's also a benefit to leaving as many things unfixed (with at most a preliminary answer) for as long as possible--you never know when (or how) inspiration will strike. Once they're fixed (in this context by being mentioned in-game), they're fixed. Until then they can change.

And thanks for the kind words. From someone who's as big on setting coherence as you are, it means something and I appreciate it.

[Nifft]

One important (to me) thing to note is that I don't do "genetics" in the Mendelian sense. DNA isn't a thing in my setting (nor are cells or even atoms as we know them). Instead it's all about souls and compatibility between souls.

This means that the artificial creations aren't a matter of generations-long breeding projects--they're much quicker and much more...well...evil. Either you overlay an individual with the appropriate aspects through ritual/possession during the conception process or you inject fragments of the souls of the desired species into unborn children using blood magic. While this may take many attempts to perfect, it's much faster than the earthly equivalent.

Possession + breeding is a really neat idea, with a lot of potential.


Let me spitball a little...

- Perhaps there are many different types of spirits which can possess a mortal. Fey for example, and ghosts, and elementals, and strange psychic entities from the realm of dreams, in addition to the expected celestials & fiends.

- Perhaps Elves were kickstarted as mortals bred while possessed by Fey. Or perhaps that's how lesser, more mortal-looking Fey were created -- Nymphs, Dryads, Pixies, etc. Perhaps that's why those lesser fey tend to have an interest in mortals.

- For the "evil" races, perhaps they were bred via ghost possession, and the violence & obsessive regrets of their ghost ancestors continue to goad them into violence and other obsessive actions. Orc death cults for Orcus might also be a thing.

- Dwarves might be bred from mortals possessed by earth elementals; azer by fire elementals; gnomes by fox spirits.

- Halflings were the only original mortals. Humans are just halflings cross-bred with giants. That's why humans look so much like halflings.


Parasitism might also be a thing. Maybe when a mortal gets inspired by a spirit, the parasites that feast upon the mortal's flesh are also infused with supernatural power. That might by how Intellect Devourers came to be -- bot-fly larvae in the flesh of an uplift candidate, possessed by an astral spirit of dream and higher thought.

[brian 333]

Bacteria are sometimes able to acquire DNA from other bacteria which results in a new species. This asexual 'breeding' is poorly understood, but it happens.

Similarly, beings capable of possessing a living host may leave behind fragments of themselves which alter the host and/or the possessor.

Another way beings react to invasion is by creating immunities, such as the Sickle Cell response to malaria. It may be that in developing 'immunities' to possession, traits such as magic resistance emerged.

The study of evolution primarily focuses on responses to environmental change and niche opportunities, but there are huge impacts from many sources, not the least of which are unforced replication errors which have nothing to do with external stimuli.

So, breeding alone need not be the driver of evolution in an environment which also includes creation. Parasites and viruses can cause evolution, as well as artificial selection from divine interference.

Example (not for use other than for demonstration purposes):

A mortal species is bred for intelligence by some group of deities.

Diety A chooses to have his mortal breeding population assume a form similar to Devas and Solars, culling the knuckle-draggers while selecting breeding pairs from the most 'attractive'.

Deity B tosses his breeding population into a desert to thrive or die as they can, intervening only to prevent extinction.

Deity C locates his breeding colony in a sub-tropical forest, granting them characteristics such as the animals of that region possess. This might include exothermic temperature regulation and scales. These lizardfolk are completely unrelated to actual reptiles, which incidentally may allow lizard folk to breed with the non-reptile relatives raised by Deities A&B.

Deity D loses interest in the project and abandons his breeding population, which becomes infested with spirit-parasites. These parasites accidentally trigger the host's resistances, which makes it increasingly more difficult to possess them. This forces the parasites and hosts into a constant state of flux as they each continue to mutate to increase their survival rate. Within a dozen generations you end up with Dopplegangers and Quasits in the place of the two original species.

[Max_Killjoy]

While it relates to real human genetics, I was just watching something that might be of interest here.

Evidently there's a particular bit of genetics that allows Tibetans to survive long-term at very high altitudes, without the complications that it causes for most other humans.

This bit of genetics is only found in modern Tibetans, a few related peoples... and in the remains of Denisovans.

(I thought this linked in a little bit to the notion of it being the humans, and not some other "race", who are the fecund, compatible, breedy ones, picking up adaptations through "being friendly".)

[LordWarGod]

While I understand the urge to introduce evolution into a fantasy setting, it is a vice to which I have never succumbed. In a setting in which creation is known to be true, it seems to me that any attempt at scientific organization of species is futile. You would keep running into individual acts of creation.

Instead of a Tree of Life you'd have a Lawn of Life with many individual plants, some of which may connect to others by runners. Most of the plants in your Lawn would have blown in on the wind and be wholly unrelated to one another.

I agree with this, if there is a God in the world then there's really no point in trying to be scientific in categorizing species according to evolution.

[Nifft]

I agree with this, if there is a God in the world then there's really no point in trying to be scientific in categorizing species according to evolution.

Just a point of correction: evolution didn't create our species categories, that's just us humans trying to explain what we see.

In fact, evolution keeps surprising us with examples of creatures that don't fit our categories. The most accessible example may be Ring Species.

[PhoenixPhyre]

Just a point of correction: evolution didn't create our species categories, that's just us humans trying to explain what we see.

In fact, evolution keeps surprising us with examples of creatures that don't fit our categories. The most accessible example may be Ring Species.

And what I care about for this case is just the categories.

We can categorize things based on their source even if they're entirely artificial. Some widgets come from China. Some from Nowhere-ville. Etc.

For me, knowing why a particular species (although I don't particularly like that word in this context, since it presumes too much) exists in the world--where it came from, who/what created it or how it came into existence--is important to knowing how it fits. Habitats, traits, culture (to a lesser degree, since there's too many other confounding factors), etc. all depend at least partially on the origin of the species.