Bloodline -those who are lost?

[Grim Reader]

I have been thinking of putting a lost race into my setting. One that went extinct long ago. They will just be mentioned here and there in the very oldest songs and writings, and never by name. But I was thinking that I may want a bloodline still extant. Players do love the "last child of ..." thing after all. Only I am very uncertain what kind of abilities, bonus spells etc I should give. I do want them to remain a mystery after all.

Anyone have any thoughts?

[Nifft]

The lost people were actually Neanderthals, and nearly everyone is very slightly descended from them. In reality they're the least-special people.

But they're gone (as a distinct, separate group), so in their absence stories grew up about how great they were, and what was lost in their passing.

Elves think humans are weird for this, since they know what really happened.

[the_david]

Humans are extinct. Though there are still Half-Orcs and Half-Elves, as well as other human descended races, pure bred humans are fully extinct. Aasimar, Tieflings, Genasi, Illumians. They all still exist. In fact, all races have more or less some human in them. But yeah, the humans are gone.

Okay, maybe not, but it would make an interesting setting.

There is the 5 races trope:
Stout: The warrior race, usually Dwarves.
High men: The superior race, usually Elves.
Mundane: An average race, usually Humans.
Fairy: The most magical race, usually Elves.
Cute: Usually a small race such as Hobbits, Halflings or Gnomes.

This does not include the evil races. High men usually works best, as you want your extinct race to have left some of the best ruins, and that means they must have been rich, civilized and possibly noble. They must have done something wrong to deserve this genocide so they're probably evil too.
They don't even have to be extinct. It could just be a fallen civilization/culture/ethnicity and the humans have no idea what they lost
So I guess my question is what kind of trope did they fill? Why did they have to die? What kind of dangerous artefacts did they leave behind.

Also, the Azlanti from Rise of the Runelords.

[Grim Reader]

Great minds think alike it seems. I've actually actually used concepts similar to both those in my setting already:)

It began when I was reading a paper on Neanderthal-Human hybrids. It seems there was a significant fitness-cost associated with the hybridization. And I looked at the Elf stats, +2 Int and Dex, -2 Con. And I thought "That is how a hybrid would look from the Neanderthal perspective. Smart and gracile, but frail and unhealthy." So I filed of the serial number on the elves, and decided they were the half-elves. Full blood elves have left the world quite recently. They were true immortals, and quite different from mortal races. If mortal races can hybridize the offspring has no Con penalty.

I also looked at the plethora of Bloodlines available, and decided that human genetics must be really messy by now. Pure bred humans are still around, but quite rare. People with no hint of ancestry from other races or bloodlines. They are Not Very Magical. I based them on Karsites, and called them Ur-Men.

[Dusk Raven]

Real-life hybrids can vary - if I recall correctly, mules are smarter and sturdier than both donkeys and horses, a phenomenon known as "hybrid vigor" which is essentially the opposite of "inbreeding depression." But I digress.

When it comes to my own use of "rare descendant of an ancient race" trope... in one of my settings, all humanoid races are descended from a single humanoid species that lived underground and had a highly magical society up until the invasion of outsiders from that setting's equivalent of the Far Realm. Most of the survivors moved to the surface, and many of the ones who remained underground degenerated into "Dark Folk" - but there are a handful of purebloods who survived to the present day.

In D&D terms - well, Pathfinder terms - I gave characters of that race a bonus to Dexterity and Charisma, but a penalty to Wisdom - they have a sort of aesthetic beauty to them as well as personal charm, but they're also a little bit loopy (I also wanted them to be worse at divine magic, since they came from a time before the widespread use of Divine magic). They had some abilities (spell-like or otherwise) that revolved around protection, stealth, and nondetection (literally, a constant nondetection spell), as well as a bonus against mind-affecting effects - one theme is that despite their penalty to Wisdom they're actually quite hard to read, and they've survived in part due to their ability to hide themselves.

EDIT:

I also looked at the plethora of Bloodlines available, and decided that human genetics must be really messy by now. Pure bred humans are still around, but quite rare. People with no hint of ancestry from other races or bloodlines. They are Not Very Magical. I based them on Karsites, and called them Ur-Men.

Interestingly enough, in the aforementioned setting of mine, there never were pureblood humans - humans are the only race in that setting that can interbreed with other races, but that's because they themselves are basically "mongrelfolk" and are true-breeding hybrids of all the other races (and ironically, the closest to their underground-dwelling common ancestors, yet still different).

[Grim Reader]

Real-life hybrids can vary - if I recall correctly, mules are smarter and sturdier than both donkeys and horses, a phenomenon known as "hybrid vigor" which is essentially the opposite of "inbreeding depression." But I digress.

Well, it is a bit more complicated than that. Putting it simply you get hybrid vigor when the species are different but not too different. If they have drifted apart too far, you get more and more cases where you have to hammer square pegs into round holes or just fasten the peg with glue and duct-tape. Eventually you get two incompatible biological programs and running both results in epic biological faceplant.

Humans and Neanderthals seem to have been about as different biologically as Tigers and Lions, or a bit more. Despite all the millennia of overlapping with Neanderthals we only seem to have interbred with one specific lineage.

Anyway, I think I'm going to use the Samsarans as the base for my lost race. The "Racial momory" thing is just too good a tool to pass up.