Josh's "Green Porn" setting project

[Josh_Kablack]

This needs a better name, but that tag will do for a working title as I mentioned this in response to the Green Porn youtube link


Issue One: All of the races in this setting are going to be based on real-world animals that have rare and unusual mating and reproductive habits. We're going to have parthogenesis, facaultative gender and extreme sexual dimorphism - because those things actually exist among animals here on earth. If you are offended by discussion such oddities, I do not want your input. If you are offended because I'm likely gonna have different stat lines for different genders among the elephant-seal analogs, I do not want your input. Suggest a better way to model such extreme sexual dimorphism and I'll listen, but if you're here to whine about how that's sexist, then I'm gonna remind you that I am not talking about the real-world nature or ideal of human beings with such a design decision and then I'm gonna put you on ignore. The overall point here is the same as all fantasy roleplaying: to learn more about ourselves by pretending to be others who are very different.

Issue Two: Is going to be how we get to something that can be called a "culture" while keeping the reproductive methods a viable strategy for producing offspring. The human standard of lengthy gestation and risky birth followed by over a decade of parental / bi-parental care is just not going to be applicable to all of these races. As much as I want to make things plausible, crazy stuff like ancestral memory, psychic powers, memetic brain parasites and "dude it's magic" is going to end up being invoked.

Issue Three: This is a D&D world. All that crazy naturalist reproduction is gonna get mapped to creatures that exist in most D&D games. This is gonna mean rewriting chunks of the flavor for many of them. Still I would like to keep such rewrites small enough that the original creature is still recognizable.

Issue Four: This is a D&D world, so there have to be plausible explanation for why certain individuals of each playable species might become adventurers. Now that the very nature of this project is gonna mean that the "rescue and marry the princess" quest is gonna be out the window for several of these races. I can deal with that, but if it's absolutely impossible to have adventure hooks for individuals within a race,then the race cannot be a playable race.

So with those disclaimers out of the way, here's the first draft of candidate critters and their reproductive habits:

• Ants/Bees or other hive insects - where most individuals are sterile Workers or Soldiers and reproduction is carried out by Queens and Drones.
• Aphids - who reproduce clonally for dozens of generations but have a single generation of cripples which reproduces sexually in order to lay eggs which can survive the winter.
• Black Widow or Praying Mantis - something that practices sexual cannibalism.
• Parasitoid Wasps - which incubate their eggs inside another species
• Seahorse - in which the incubation / gestation of fertilized eggs is transferred back from the mother to the father. Alternately, birds that split nesting duties would work here, but the mechanics of the seahorse bit is less familiar to most players and therefore more potentially interesting
• Snails - hermaphrodites who shoot love darts at each other
• Spotted Hyenas - who have a nepotistic matriarchal society
• Elephant Seals - who have extreme sexual dimorphism, due to a winner-takes-all competition among males within limited breeding. Over half of each year's pups are sired by a single bull male.
• Komodo Dragons - these aquatic reptiles reproduce both sexually and asexually. However the way their chromosomes work means that a female who reproduces asexually lays a clutch of eggs that hatches into both males and females. This allows a single female alone to colonize a new island while maintaining the disease and parasite resistance conferred by sexual reproduction. Also, they may be poisonous or just infectious. Also they like to reuse nesting sites of birds.
• Frogs - or something else with Lek-based reproduction, where they have a big rave/orgy each mating season.
• Blood Flukes - when a male and female mate they bond physically and their morphology changes with each taking on new tasks.
• Humans - here both as a reference point for players, and also because the human strategies of extended parental care and menopause are seemingly unique.

[Josh_Kablack]

Rough Matches to D&D critters and initial brainstorming:

Hive Insects - D&D has a bunch of insectoid races (Thri-Kreen, Abeil, Formians, etc) any of which could work here. However I'm thinking it's a bit closer to D&D mainstays to go back to the "mine spirit" type of Kobold and have them living in underground anthill-like colonies. Of course redefining them as hive-organized means dropping the dogface 2e flavor and the dracofetishist 3e flavor and replace with either ant/bee/paper wasp or molerat flavoring.

Aphids - they live by eating sap from a single plant and for all but one generation are all clonal females. This is a snap-tite fit with the D&D Dryad. They get to be low-virulence tree parasites. Instead of Charm, they get to produce something like honeydew, which might have similar effects, or maybe it's just useful to the hive-insect analogues which live in symbiosis with them. Potentially they have camouflage abilities to blend in with trees or maybe even other races. And instead of splitting into two genders to lay eggs for winter, they have a two-gender generation as a prelude to whatever periodic apocalypse our fantasy world ends up with. (high magic attracting horrors, low-magic ebbing away, nemesis orbital approach, the on/off star going dormant, etc)

Black widow/Praying Mantis/sexual cannibals - for classic D&D, this says Drow. But drow are so heavy with other preconceptions and entail bringing in non-drow elves that I'd like to look for other options. If I go with kobolds for the hive race, that leaves the mantis-like Thri-Kreen as a possibility here. Alternately I skip right past Drow and go over to Drider / taruic Spider - which if you remove the flip-flopping bit about Llolth's test and just make them their own independant race is probably doable.

Parasitoid Wasps - 3e outright has stats for Spider Eaters in the MM, but they are really just atomic horror insects and not playable. I'm looking for something that at least has hands. They gotta be decent hunters and at least the females (if not both genders) need a long-term paralysis so that larva can eat the victims from the inside out. Seems to me that the best match here is going to be a slightly reworked Medusa, where petrifying gaze is replaced with a sting that induces a weeks-to-month long paralysis and causes the skin of the victim to darken, harden and become merely stonelike rather than actual stone.

Seahorse - D&D has a whole slew of aquatic races, so I'm tempted to keep this as an aquatic or amphibious race. Especially as the big deal seems to be that the male helps the developing young adapt to the salinity of the water. That points to something like Merfolk, Aquatic Elves or even Icthyocentaurs. However, I suppose this could just as well be a land, arboreal or avain species.

Snails - There are War Snail stats floating around D&D somewhere. But again, they lack hands, and really the interesting-to-me part is not the shell, monapedal body structure, nor slime trail. The interesting part is the hermaphoditism and love darts. For now, I'm thinking some sort of doppelganger/changeling. I want to keep the love dart bit too, but I guess I'll have to be careful to not turn it into "you have the power of rufies". To take it back to the earlier meanings of changeling, I could have it be a recessive phenotype among humans -as scientifically implausible as that is, it does let changelings breed with normal humans and lets normal (unknowingly heterozygous) humans have changeling babies that are clearly not human.

Spotted Hyenas - D&D has walking bipedal hyena people. That's not quite how Plunkett first imagined them, but it's what Gnoll has come to mean post-Gygax. These get to be pretty much like the Hyenas in the Digger webcomic, except likely more savage scavenger and less AmerInd glory of the hunt mysticism. Also, while they can only breed in-species, they quite possibly get to not completely taboo recreational inter-species sex, because hey we haven't had a proper dogrape discussion on this board for like two whole days now.

Elephant Seals. So in a single species you have females, sexually mature but non-dominant males and bull males. D&D does have a playable race with multiple subtypes, this is a natural fit for goblinoids. Bull males get bugbear stats, non-dominant males and females split up goblin and hobgoblin between them. Why a humanoid race has such a limited breeding ground as to lead to something like elephant seal levels of dimorphism needs some serious though here. Also if these are going to be playable, and bull males don't just die from wounds after a mating season, then the mechanics for transition need to be thought out.

Komodo Dragons - the obvious visual fit and already amphibious enough to be island-hopping race is Lizardfolk. There're going to be some issues explaining how culture happens if we hew closely to actual komodo dragon life cycle, but I'm sure we can come up with something.

Frogs / Lek Based: Well there is always the power of GIANT FROG, but that sort of absurdist running joke is not what I'm going for here. A cursory look at wikipedia turns up holy shit: there's a millipede that shoots hydrogen cyanide. But anyways Lek-based reproduction requires that the females are self-sufficient (as opposed to choosing a male for resources), a distinct mating season and that the males can sing and/or dance and/or display plumage and/or build crazy structures. That's pretty much screaming Fey/Faeries to me.

Blood Flukes: Oddly, D&D is pretty thin on Voltron monsters, and pretty much nowhere on playable voltron races. Sure there's the vargouille and the Chimera - but that's decidedly nonhuman and antogonistic. So I'm looking for something where a couple small forms can merge into becoming a single medium form or a couple medium forms can merge into a large form. Yuan-Ti are a potential match here, and do at least evoke the trematode's body structure, but I'm hoping I can find something better.
Furthermore the life cycle of the blood fluke only works because it is an endoparasite. The male can focus on ingesting food from the human host's bloodstream while the female focuses on laying more eggs - precisely because they are living in a nutrient bath. Since I'm not trying to write Parasite: The Internal Organs, these should be a free-living organism - or at most some type of parasitoid. To get this sort of lifecycle in a free living organism would require an equivalent nutrient source - so either these feed off of ambient magical energy or are incredible efficient insectivores who live in clouds of mosquitos or some such.

Humans: These get to stay humans. Maybe I rename them Folk or Humes or something just to sidestep arguments about the degree of dimorphism in real world humans or how natural monogamy is for us, and other such unresolvable silliness.

[Username17]

Hive Insects - D&D has a bunch of insectoid races (Thri-Kreen, Abeil, Formians, etc) any of which could work here. However I'm thinking it's a bit closer to D&D mainstays to go back to the "mine spirit" type of Kobold and have them living in underground anthill-like colonies. Of course redefining them as hive-organized means dropping the dogface 2e flavor and the dracofetishist 3e flavor and replace with either ant/bee/paper wasp or molerat flavoring.

I don't see why they would have to stop having dog heads or stop fetishizing dragons to have a hive structure. Seriously, it's totally orthogonal. Mole Rats have a hive structure with queens and workers and shit, and they are mammals. Tunneling mammals at that. If you want to see what a higher vertebrate looks like with a hive structure, just look at the Mole Rat and move on.

They even have "Adventurers". There are seriously Mole Rats who go on long term exploration missions and Mole Rats who go on temporary or permanent loan to other hives.

Black widow/Praying Mantis/sexual cannibals -

Black Widows and Mantises don't actually do that. They have pretty extreme sexual dimorphism where the females are much more badass than the males, and they are fiercely territorial. There is a brief period during mating season where the males are allowed to enter the female's territory, and if they are still there when time runs out they will be attacked, killed, and eaten.

But the big deal here is not that the male is going to be consumed, it's that the males and females don't even talk outside mating periods and wll seriously fight to the death at other times. It would be like if all the Gith Yanki were female and all the Gith Zerai were male. And the factions stayed at war except during a special ceremony when a Gith boy turned 12 and was allowed to escape to the Gith Zerai monastery and a separate special ceremony where Gith got together for extreme sexing.

Parasitoid Wasps -

The obvious pairing is the Neogi of course. They spend most of their life running around being regular Neogi, but periodically one of them will convert into a Great Old Master, lay a bunch of eggs (in itself) and turn into an immobile baby machine. Gross? Hellz yes.

They can even do some regular egg laying in their own dominated victims.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Black Widows and Mantises don't actually do that. They have pretty extreme sexual dimorphism where the females are much more badass than the males, and they are fiercely territorial. There is a brief period during mating season where the males are allowed to enter the female's territory, and if they are still there when time runs out they will be attacked, killed, and eaten.

How it happens in the field is actually a subject of current scientific debate.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantis#Rep ... fe_history
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sexual_cannibalism

My understanding is that the male is going in with the intent of coming back alive and living to breed later - but when it goes badly and escape becomes impossible, the male falls back on a secondary reproductive strategy of making absolutely sure that this female is properly inseminated and well-fed enough to lay a bunch of eggs.

However, you're right in that the biggest deal here is having the race split into two parallel but gender-segregated cultures.

[erik]

Humans staying named as humans is more appropriate in this genre than any other since it is short for humanoid, and they're actually unique in that regard.

At first I was "ew", since I don't like mixing sex and RPGs simply because often I'm table top gaming with a bunch of guy friends and it can get uncomfortable. But I think I really like the idea of making non-human races very different, and sexual dimorphism and different mating methods goes a long way towards putting the non-human into the other races. I prefer that a lot more than pointy ears, bad Scottish accents and kleptomania as somehow defining racial aspects.

[Username17]

For Seahorse reproduction, you don't need water, you just need eggs. So while it is tempting to use Kua-Toa or some shit, you should actually just use Lizard Folk. Lizardfolk men have a pouch that they put eggs in to keep them safe somehow, and then when they hatch they can have little lizard joeys sticking out of their pouch. The female lizardfolk also have a pouch full of egg, but that egg is pre-fertilized and growing.

So a lizard woman whose egg is full sized finds a lizard man with an empty pouch and he fertilizes her egg and she slips it into his pouch so that she can start growing a new egg.

Now for Leks, what you want is some species that has some reason to mate in some special place. That way you can have all the males stand around in a big circle and struggle with each other over the best spots or have dance offs or whatever. Then the females will wander in and decide which males get the mating. So the obvious here would be something like Kuo-Toa where you had breeding pools and the females had to go there to get their nookie on, so the males could sing long slow sad ballads to try to get women to choose them. Or, you know, fight with giant nut crackers and glue.

-Username17

[PhaedrusXY]

There's a writeup here with kobolds having that kind of queen/worker reproductive setup.

[shirak]

If you go with Mole Rat as Hive I think you should go with Gnomes instead of Kobolds. They're basically just like Kobolds with extra whiskers and burrowing mammal behavior.

[the_taken]

You forgot Bedbug Sex

Edit -> And Suicide Sex

[Sashi]

Seahorse + Mole Rat = A giant "hive" of tunnels with a small/singular number of Queens that birth a litter of joeys, each of which is transferred to a male's pouch.

[PhaedrusXY]

You forgot Bedbug Sex

Edit -> And Suicide Sex

Wow. I wrote up a version of "bedbug sex" years ago for a race of intelligent humanoid insects in an RPG supplement, and had no idea that something like that actually existed in nature...

[Judging__Eagle]

I've taken to treating Kobolds as extremely ancient Therapsids, allowing them to be both fuzzy dog people, and fanged [url=http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Therapsida]scaly[/i] creatures.

I've got it into my head that adult females are larger and four legged; while males are hominid shaped. The males wear armour and carry weapons; while the females are massive, have giant claws and fangs. Having them breed using the Frog/Lek system is plausible. At mating season all the local males that are eligable go on display in central places, and the females divy them up to be part of their 'tribe'.

Eggs are laid in clutches that number in massive amounts, and the when younglings hatch, they scamper off into the caves, forests, seas or deserts before being called the the nearest breeding ceremony. Of course, a male or female kobold could wander out of Kobold inhabited territory, but it's not likely, as the species is globally distributed, and being both intelligent, and a burrowing species, they tend to remain unobtrusive wherever they live.

The bulk of male kobolds are probably hired out as guards, labourers, or the like by their matrons. The males are fine with this arrangement as those considered "low end" have their entire gamete tract removed, and absorbed into the female, to produce clutches of "low end" kobolds to more rapidly expand, and maintain, population levels. More powerful males either don't mate until near death (so that their gametes are proven to be higher quality); or females have dual options for mating; either able to entirely remove a males entire gamete generating organs, or obtain enough gametes to fertilize a single clutch of eggs.

Now, for FAR, the fact that one whole gender doesn't use equipment (usually) doesn't mean that they can't compete. Female Kobolds will be buying Giantism, Toughness, and Unarmed strikes; perhaps with some things like Natural Weapons, or Biomancy and then unlock supernatural attacks. The abilities are the same, but the dice pools are coming from different sources.

[Prak]

Just my rough take on a few of them.

Hive Insects - D&D has a bunch of insectoid races (Thri-Kreen, Abeil, Formians, etc) any of which could work here. However I'm thinking it's a bit closer to D&D mainstays to go back to the "mine spirit" type of Kobold and have them living in underground anthill-like colonies. Of course redefining them as hive-organized means dropping the dogface 2e flavor and the dracofetishist 3e flavor and replace with either ant/bee/paper wasp or molerat flavoring.

Or you just inject a little insect flavouring into the reptilian kobolds and make them kythons-light.

Black widow/Praying Mantis/sexual cannibals - for classic D&D, this says Drow. But drow are so heavy with other preconceptions and entail bringing in non-drow elves that I'd like to look for other options. If I go with kobolds for the hive race, that leaves the mantis-like Thri-Kreen as a possibility here. Alternately I skip right past Drow and go over to Drider / taruic Spider - which if you remove the flip-flopping bit about Llolth's test and just make them their own independant race is probably doable.

If you're going to do this with Thri-kreen, I would say stay away from the Praying Mantis reasoning (where the male basically can't get it up with his head on) and find some other reason, so that my outcast Thri Kreen male can get it on with other races more regularly than "once. roll up a new character" On the other hand, if my information is incorrect, then... well nevermind.

Parasitoid Wasps - 3e outright has stats for Spider Eaters in the MM, but they are really just atomic horror insects and not playable. I'm looking for something that at least has hands. They gotta be decent hunters and at least the females (if not both genders) need a long-term paralysis so that larva can eat the victims from the inside out. Seems to me that the best match here is going to be a slightly reworked Medusa, where petrifying gaze is replaced with a sting that induces a weeks-to-month long paralysis and causes the skin of the victim to darken, harden and become merely stonelike rather than actual stone.

Slaad. They even have the impregnate thing already.

Seahorse - D&D has a whole slew of aquatic races, so I'm tempted to keep this as an aquatic or amphibious race. Especially as the big deal seems to be that the male helps the developing young adapt to the salinity of the water. That points to something like Merfolk, Aquatic Elves or even Icthyocentaurs. However, I suppose this could just as well be a land, arboreal or avain species.

Icthyocentaurs would kind of rock, to be honest.

Spotted Hyenas - D&D has walking bipedal hyena people. That's not quite how Plunkett first imagined them, but it's what Gnoll has come to mean post-Gygax. These get to be pretty much like the Hyenas in the Digger webcomic, except likely more savage scavenger and less AmerInd glory of the hunt mysticism. Also, while they can only breed in-species, they quite possibly get to not completely taboo recreational inter-species sex, because hey we haven't had a proper dogrape discussion on this board for like two whole days now.

Most people already seem to run their gnolls like actual hyenas, social structure wise, since honestly I think every D&D player has an inner furry trying to get out that makes them research actual hyenas or something.

Elephant Seals. So in a single species you have females, sexually mature but non-dominant males and bull males. D&D does have a playable race with multiple subtypes, this is a natural fit for goblinoids. Bull males get bugbear stats, non-dominant males and females split up goblin and hobgoblin between them. Why a humanoid race has such a limited breeding ground as to lead to something like elephant seal levels of dimorphism needs some serious though here. Also if these are going to be playable, and bull males don't just die from wounds after a mating season, then the mechanics for transition need to be thought out.

A lot of gamers I've met seem to be commensurate perverts who would likely have no problem with their bugbear character going out in a blaze of female sexing glory when he dies of sexual exhaustion. So maybe the bull males die of sexual exhaustion rather than wounds.

Frogs / Lek Based: Well there is always the power of GIANT FROG, but that sort of absurdist running joke is not what I'm going for here. A cursory look at wikipedia turns up holy shit: there's a millipede that shoots hydrogen cyanide. But anyways Lek-based reproduction requires that the females are self-sufficient (as opposed to choosing a male for resources), a distinct mating season and that the males can sing and/or dance and/or display plumage and/or build crazy structures. That's pretty much screaming Fey/Faeries to me.

Elves. Troll the elf fanboys and make Elves crazy bower bird lek based reproducing things.

[Josh_Kablack]

So attempting to move forward in small chunks.

Taking into account the responses so far, it seems that the following are pretty easy sells:

Humans = Humans
Gnolls = Spotted Hyenas
Goblinoids = Elephant Seals
Dryads = Aphids
Kobolds = Mole Rats (gnomes are saddled with Dragonlance flavor amongst my likely players).

The others are a bit less certain, but starting with those 5. The big deals for each seem to be:

Humans: dunno yet, see below

Gnolls: Multii-tiered dominence hierarchies. Packs within a clan, communal feeding on large prey that rewards formalized aggression. Young are raised in communal dens, shared between mothers of similar status. Diversity is maintained via culturally justified exile of a significant number of individuals from the clan they were born into. There should be elaborate rites of acceptance into a new clan. Culture probably has most mythic heroes as "immigrant" members of a new clan proving themselves worthy. Exile and rites of acceptance and myths all tie together to provide adventurer motivation.

Goblinoids. To evolve elephant-seal esque dimorphism, the breeding ground has to be very limited, so that one males really could keep an eye on all the receptive females to chase off other males during a mating season. ("Belligerent as a bull bugbear" should be a common in-setting description) For that to happen it has to provide something rare that is a huge advantage to bearing young or building dens. Of course, in the real world, many where males get this competitive evolve "imposter" males who exhibit female morphology - and that would also work well with the multiple subtype nature of goblins.

Dryads: Always pregnant - even before an individuals' own birth (see telescoping generations). Always turning wood/sap into more dryads. Symbiotic relationship with Kobolds. Intrinsically aware of the effects of pred/prey cycles and the dangers of overpopulation, and compensate by sending daughters away to find and plant new trees. Very likely get a form of ancestral memory where the mother shares consciousness as well as nutrients with the developing fetus. So the memories of the mother and grandmother at the time of her birth and forever accessible to each daughter, and from her first awareness up until immediately following the birth of her eldest daughter no dryad is ever alone in her head.


Kobolds. The big deal here is eusociality. For Kobolds "live and hive are the same word". They are great burrowers and defend their nests with elaborate traps. They have also co-evolved into a sybiotic relationship with Dryads - kobold burrowing helps grow dryad trees and dryad 'honeydew' helps sustain kobold breeders. Kobold hives send scouts out as adventurers to bring back food, "treasure" and learning to better the hive.

To me, this all suggests a vaguely Africa-esque setting. We have the Gnoll clans stalking the grasslands, the Dryads both bound to and spreading the cultivation of the Acacia trees, while they themselves are cultivated as livestock for the Kobolds who mark their burrows with great mounds. During the rainy season, the goblin(oid) females scale the Great White Mountain to build their nests in the snow they need to birth their litters and the largest bull hobgoblins pursue them there to struggle with each other over the receptive females.

From there I have the temptation to portray the humans akin to British Colonialists - coming into the scene recently with greater technology than the indigenous races, but great arrogance and many erroneous preconceptions. But I fear that is getting to close to the "races as national stereotypes" trope that leads to bad Scottish accents

After that I need to make decisions on which other races/reproductive methods match up and fit into that sort of setting and then start actually developing cultural passage mechanisms and cultures.

[Grek]

Do a comination seahorse-penguin thing with the icthyocentaurs, where the males hold the egg for a long-ass time inside their pouch underwater while the females go up on land to hunt for rare and exotic foods with nutrients that get depleted during the egg-laying process. They live on the coasts, and inside the giant lake.

[Username17]

If you're going Africa-esque, you really want the Lizardfolk in there as crocodilians. Whether they end up with egg pouches for males or temperature based sex changes for eggs left in mud piles, having a crocodile based lizardfolk is absolutely required if you're going to do D&D of the Serengeti.

In any case, when you mentioned your Human plans, I immediately thought of the Humans from Age of Wonders, which I think is a pretty good fit. Airships and muskets for the invaders.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

first, two questions for Frank (or anyone else who can answer)
1. Can you point me to a half-decent online reference for Neogi? Sure there's the schematic for their spelljamming ships on the wall of Mole's game room, but I don't seem to have stats, descripts or anything like that in any of the books I own.

2. Never played Age of Wonders - can you give a bit more detail what you mean when suggesting the humans from that game?

Moving on:

Crocodillians as a renamed lizardfolk sound good, although I still gotta think if they get the seahorse egg pouch deal or the komodo dragon deal.

If included, that seashorse+penguin hybrid would work well for Ichtycentaurs, who for this setting would get to be Hippotastic. And if I go that route, it means the crocodillians get the komodo dragon deal.


Then the next question before making decisions on the remaining candidate races is "How many playable races do I need?" this is distinctly NOT a kitchen sink game, so the number has to be small enough for players to keep track of the different races and cultures and their interactions. But at the same time it has to be large enough to allow player choice. 3e and 4e both start with 7 races in the first book and then add more later. If I do run this in 4e, stat setup in 4e suggests that there should be a race for each two-stat combo - which is 15 races if everybody gets static racial mods and fewer if some races have wildcard mods. So I probably want at least 7, and absolutely no more than 15 playable races.

[Prak]

Icthyocentaurs with a ceolocanth lower body would rock, and it would give the females the necessary appendages to move around, albeit slowly, on land, I think.

[Username17]

The Neogi get mad props in the Monster Manual 2 and Lords of Madness.

Age of Wonders has a relatively standard set of 12 humanoid races that generally tries to cling to Tolkienian standards. It also has 3 alignments and lumps 4 races into each category. So you have Orcs, Goblins, Dark Elves, and Undead for the evil races and Elves, Halflings, Dwarves, and "High Men" (renamed Archons in the second version to distance themselves from Tolkien a bit) for the good races. The neutral races were Frostlings (like inuit goblins who had war penguins), lizard (who were aquatic and could run around on water), and Humans. There were also some fire based people who were basically arabs or something, but no one cared and they were replaced with cat people in the sequel and there was much rejoicing. The games have much that is interesting, and also have an integrated ethnic cleansing mechanic that you probably don't want to emulate in polite company.

Anyway, the basic story involves the Humans (who I remind you are not good) upsetting the balance of everything by showing up unexpectedly from across the seas with muskets and air ships. And then they came and sacked the capital of the Elves and made a home there. The Elf/Dark Elf split in AoW is extremely recent as it basically involves the children of the dead Elf King - with one of them going underground to bring his father back as a soul eating lich, and the other running off to the West so that she can try to live in peace with the Hobbits. And then the rest of the elves splitting up to join one of those two factions.

It's interesting in that regardless of what faction you play, the humans who are building an airship factory on top of the ancient Elf capitol are the final boss. Their armies wear blue and white tabards, so to the extent that they are specific Europeans they are French. They even have a unit called a Charlatan.

But that reminds me: under no circumstances should the tree planters who get milked by your mole rats be dryads. They should be elves. Dryad should be a title.

-Username17

[Josh_Kablack]

Icthyocentaurs with a ceolocanth lower body would rock, and it would give the females the necessary appendages to move around, albeit slowly, on land, I think.

I'm seeing that as cool but not workable. The very limited sketchup I have so far is postulating that "the tunnels of an enemy kobold hive", "the gresslands of the Gnoll clans" and "the ascent to of the Great White Mountain" are going to be adventuring locales. A race which has the land mobility of a lungfish is just not going make for PCs who can adventure in such locations. It could maybe get around such issues by setting the race up with a form of ambiphious gender dimorphism, where one gender is primarily aquatic and the other is primarily terristrial - but I don't know of any creatures which work that way in the real world and I think other races are going to cover a lot of dimorphism ground anyways.

But that reminds me: under no circumstances should the tree planters who get milked by your mole rats be dryads. They should be elves. Dryad should be a title.-Username17

And why precisely is that?

[Josh_Kablack]

Thoughts about stuff not yet nailed down and open questions:

Seahorse - in which the incubation / gestation of fertilized eggs is transferred back from the mother to the father. Alternately, birds that split nesting duties would work here, but the mechanics of the seahorse bit is less familiar to most players and therefore more potentially interesting

Komodo Dragons - these aquatic reptiles reproduce both sexually and asexually. However the way their chromosomes work means that a female who reproduces asexually lays a clutch of eggs that hatches into both males and females. This allows a single female alone to colonize a new island while maintaining the disease and parasite resistance conferred by sexual reproduction. Also, they may be poisonous or just infectious. Also they like to reuse nesting sites of birds.

Options on these two are

1. Crocodillians (lizardfolk) get seahorse like egg-trading between genders and the Komodo dragon's sometimes parthogenic / sometimes sexual reproduction does not get assigned to a playable race (but possibly assigned to dragons or another big deal monster)

or

2. Crocodillans get the komodo dragons sex-is-optional reproduction method and Hippotaurs get the seahorse/penguin mix Grek suggested above.

Black Widow or Praying Mantis - something that practices sexual cannibalism.

My original ideas were Thri-Kreen or Driders. The Gith suggestion is somewhat tempting, but the Gith seem to come with baggage that might not fit the setting as it stands.

Right now I'm leaning towards assigning this to th Gith, but making the Gith a non-playable (or at least not initially playable) elder race who left the setting prior to the great cataclysm of X centuries past. They all went off to live in the astral plane, but adventurers still find their ruins and occasionally a silver sword or planar key they left behind.

Parasitoid Wasps - which incubate their eggs inside another species

Candidate races for this are currently Medusae, Neogi, Slaad, and Tinkerbell-sized pixies.

An offline friend made a surprisingly good case for parasitoid pixies: citing time lost under faerie mounds as indicative of being paralyzed and buried; drawing a correlation between faerie revelry and the nectarivorious intoxicating behaviors of pepsis wasps; and making the point that assigning this to something small and cute mutes their horror. If they can incubate inside rabbits instead of things like warthogs and PC races, it becomes more likely they will actually be chosen by players and less likely that their reproductive nature would bias other races against them.

Snails - hermaphrodites who shoot love darts at each other

There have been no suggestions other than my initial thoughts of changeling / doppleganger. That either means it's a perfect fit, or nobody cares and I should delete this from consideration.

Frogs - or something else with Lek-based reproduction, where they have a big rave/orgy each mating season.

Candidate races are Faries, Slaad, Elves, and Kuo-Tuo. I'm not seeing a terribly compelling reason to chose any of these, someone want to argue how any of them could work as Lek-based and fit into the preliminary setting?

Blood Flukes - when a male and female mate they bond physically and their morphology changes with each taking on new tasks.

Neat to know that Suicide sex also happens among free-living organisms. As well as mussels and endoparasites. The unifying theme among real world animals seems to be that this occurs in species where inter-gender meetings are environmentally rare., which does fit well into the D&D concept of "wandering adventure as PC".

However so far, the only candidate race is Yuan-ti, but I'm thinking there's something better.

You forgot Bedbug Sex

Actually, I left it out on purpose. Having that happen in a sentient race could seem a little too much like trying to justify rape for me to want to go there considering both my player group and the generally accepted 21st Century American social mores. Yes, having bugbear males beat each other to death to sex up a harem is fine, while having Beetlefolk males need to make a female bleed in order to make a baby is not: go go cultural hypocrisy!


But in the spirit of leaving things out on purpose, I'm also still wondering how many of these I should keep and how many I should ditch. Anyone have thoughts on that?

[Sashi]

Technically "Bedbug Sex" could be the male ejaculating onto a claw and then scratching the female to inseminate her completely consensually.

If you're going to shy away from rape, then you get into "what is rape"? You could argue that a male beating up all the other males (like elephant seal or bighorn sheep) could be construed as "rape" in terms of "I'm far more physically powerful than you, you may as well give in."

[Josh_Kablack]

Look, I said it's hypocritical, but I also said it's probably a bad idea to go there with my likely player group.

If someone wants to write up a race descript for a race that uses Traumatic Insemination and fits into the rough guidelines I've given so far, I will consider it. Specifically I will consider whether I would feel safe in showing it to the player who is a real-life rape victim and then to the player who actually did real-life jail time over false accusations of rape*.

But I feel that the odds of success there are low enough that I am not going to spend my own time writing up such a descript.

* (and for those of you who read my game logs and might try to puzzle out who those are - neither is the obvious guess)

[Sashi]

The basis of Bedbug sex isn't the male stabbing the female with his hypodermic penis, it's the lack of genitalia.

Choose any race you'd normally say "why hasn't this race conquered the world yet?" (sahaugin or whatever) and have their reproduction require one of them to literally cut themselves open for access to the egg/sperm packet. It's not about sex being involuntarily, but about it being painful.

[JonSetanta]

Wikipedia on the topic of "traumatic insemination" claims insects don't feel pain but I doubt that.