The Outer Planes, Part 4/8: Family Reunion
According to my notes, we haven’t seen or heard from Demon Queen since way the crap back here. I guess that she’s been busy planning the Fienderson Family Reunion. Those shirts don’t design themselves you know!
Of course, as we look at Sorcerer standing there beside the tiefling Thief, one begins to wonder how exactly this planar bloodline business works. Is there a percentile chart somewhere out there that determines whether you wind up with magic or pastel skin? And let’s not forget about all those half- templates floating around. How the crap are there gonna be half-fiends and fiendish creatures at the same time? Why exactly do alu-demons need to exist? And how do I transition from “outsider” to outsider with the native subtype?
I’m no planar geneticist, but it seems to me that the rules are mildly inconsistent when it comes to planetouched progeny. My only conclusion is that these things work at the speed of plot. If you need a royal in your PC’s backstory, you wind up with a noble indiscretion. If you want that dragon to hit a little harder, you say that it ate some unethically-sourced frog legs and it gets the template. It’s all about what happens to serve the plot at the moment.
And speaking of “serving the plot,” I can say with some authority that this ‘abyssal blood covenant’ business has no storyline implications whatsoever. It’s like the “say cheese” of the Abyss. It’s a perfectly innocent, everyone-says-it sort of phrase! Certainly the fiendish Demon Queen has no plans at all regarding Thief and Sorcerer. >_>
As for today’s discussion, why don’t we toss around a few of our own pet theories for planar genealogy? Do you have an internally-consistent system, or is it just willy nilly? What’s your favorite way to inject a little planar flavor into a character? Tell us all about those aasimar, half-djinn, and Hellraiser-type bloodragers down in the comments!
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The best way to inject planar flavor? 20 levels of monk. Become the spirit of roundhouse kicks.
The prophet of your religion: https://i.pinimg.com/originals/39/77/d0/3977d0a88d9551d147c2be8e1e2e61b7.jpg
I ALWAYS have an internally consistent system, especially (in my multi-generational campaign) where genetics are concerned. I basically use a lot of percentile dice with values written out in a big black notebook.
Par example: if a demon and human have a child, there’s a 99% chance that the result is a half-demon. If that half-demon has a child with a human, there’s a 25% chance of producing a half-demon and a 50% chance on top of that of producing a Tiefling. The odds of getting a half-demon quarter until they round to 0 for each generation between the half-demon and the demonic progenitor, although if two half-demons breed then the odds are always 50%, but the tiefling rate stays stable above that at 50%.
Sorcery is another thing entirely. There’s a 50% chance of transmission I the first generation. If you breed with another fiendish sorcerer,that goes up to 99% subsequently, but otherwise it halves for each generation of separation from the fiend/the last 99% pairing – but never goes below 1%.
I have no reason for any of this, or anything else in my genetics system, except that it feels right.
How do you distinguish half-demons from tieflings on the charts?
A table something like this:
Half-demon/human breeding:
Generations from progenitor / Half-demon / Tiefling / Human
1 / 01-25% / 26/75%/ 76-100%
2 / 01-06% / 07-56%/ 57-100%
3 / 01-02% / 03-52%/ 53-100%
4 / 01% / 02-51%/ 52-100%
5+ / 00% / 01-50%/ 51-100%
I’d chalk it up to how much blending is going on, and who brings in the more dominant genes.
If Demon Queen had (at least) two half-fiend children with a mortal or mortals, several things can happen. Her genes can run dominant in offspring further down the line, or they can run up against a bloodline that suppresses hers.
A lot might also depend on who DQ’s kids themselves choose to have children with.
I’d guess Sorcerer’s half-fiend ancestor chose a fully humanoid partner or partners. The mortal bloodlines would have more in common with one another than an outsider’s genes, and would reinforce one another. So long as the bloodline keeps being blended with more mortal blood and barring little surprise resurgencies of DQ’s genes, there’s no reason this branch should not continue to look fully mortal.
If we look at Thief, I’d assume her half-fiend ancestor preferred to stick with lovers closer to their own appearance. Tieflings can breed true, after all, and have a society all their own. The outsider/mortal blend of genes would remain fairly constant, too. Alternatively, whatever partner Thief’s half-fiend ancestor chose may simply not have had a lot of dominant genes to offer.
And if all this pseudo-scientific babble does not apply, there’re numerous other possible reasons why a child might turn out a specific way. A sufficiently powerful being (a god, a mage of an experimenting inclination, a demon monarch) could tamper with a child’s development so it will serve a specific purpose in life.
The god of inheritable traits, eh? Make you wonder what kind of effects a failed Fort save vs. their supernatural abilities might yield.
“Ha-ha! And now you’re a redhead!”
Maybe this particular deity is the reason why we have Mongrelfolk.
Their ancestors were probably his most devoted followers, and he kept thinking of new benefits to bestow upon them…
Awwww. Even Evil (Incarnate) Has Loved Ones 🙂 I don’t know why, but I find the topic of the villain having positive (if not necessarily healthy) relationships with other characters really fascinating. Exploring how they reconcile their villainous worldview with holding positive feeling for other people and how it influences and/or twists their relationships, seeing how their evil acts affects their loved ones, etc. It is an amazing source of drama!
As for the Planetouched, the way I see it, while you have to be a direct offspring of an Outsider (or otherwise receive a very generous and probably magic induced donation of “other planar stuff” ) to be a half-X, any mixture of mortal and Outsider blood could result in a Planetouched birth. Whether the Marilith happens to be your mom, your grandmother, or a long forgotten ancestor, you too have the chance to sprout a fetching pair of horns (and be a victim of vicious racial discrimination)!
I always imagine a picture of Hitler petting a dog. It’s all down to who / what you view as “people.”
You mean Blondi?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blondi
When your family tree includes physical incarnations of base elements or abstract moral concepts whose bodies are also their souls, relying completely on genetics as we know it to explain things seems… iffy. I do like the idea that some planetouched can come about without any close encounters of the non-native kind, given sufficient exposure to the energies of those exotic locales. if you’re pregnant and want to avoid any awkward genealogical questions, avoid leaving your native plane, being the target of any outsiders’ spell-like abilities, and any spells with alignment or elemental descriptors of about 4th level or higher. (That may be overly cautious, but there’s nothing more impressionable than an unborn soul.)
Of course, the traditional method is still viable. And that one may leave the possibility for generations to come.
Exactly. And I think the “magic” in question is the magic of the narrative hand wave.
My own interpretation of extraplanar family trees and the resulting genetics goes thusly:
Firstly fiendish/celestial/axiomatic/anarchic/ect. creatures are not part of this list at all. Those are templates that are native [note not (native) as the subtype) to a particular kind of outer plane, not creatures descended from an actual outsider. Those fiendish snakes you can summon with summon monster is not a snake descended from a demon (ect.) that’s just what “normal” snakes are like in the Abyss (ect.)
That said for the actual Outsider and mortal pairings (using human/demon to save on the ect.’s), my interpretation is that it’s a process with a lot of variance as befitting from messy biology meeting messy demonology in a meeting of the spiritual and corporal.
The general trend goes thusly through: first generation pairing makes a half-fiend if the specific pairing and circumstances doesn’t meet the requirements for something more specific like an alu-fiend or something.
Assuming the offspring gets a child with further mortals:
The generation after that are tieflings.
After that it becomes completely messy biology and can at some point result in non-tieflings and possibly throwbacks and recessive genes/spirit stuff and such like making the child of two non-tieflings be a tiefling (in that case it’s probably be one of the more subtle looking examples through). Probably some generations of mixed tiefling and non-tiefling in there.
Sorcery (and bloodraging and other similar power-sources) are a different axis to the whole process entirely. The spark might show up at any point in the process and can then be feed into full blown class abilities with training and experience (or a powerful enough spark). It’s more likely the more magical and powerful the original outsider is.
Now what if instead of subsequent pairings being with further mortals it’s with further fiends? Then you get half-fiend tieflings (or a fresh half-fiend if the mortal was down to “with distant fiendish heritage).
For how the question of how you go from outsider to outsider (native) that happens in the first generation of half-fiends since that’s when they get a separate soul instead of their body also being their soul.
Help me understand sorcery and bloodraging. They’re clearly still “bloodlines,” but not the same thing as a genetic connection…?
As I see it, it’s more a spiritual thing rather than a matter of genetics.
The heir has an internal wellspring of magical power that they can then learn to control and get actual magic powers from (in the form of either bloodraging or sorcery depending on how they go about it).
In practice it’s largely similar to if it was caused by genetics on the macro-level, through someone studying it could probably come up with all sorts of weird differences between the two processes on the micro-level. Mostly it’s a matter of tone, as well as being influenced by stuff on a magical thinking level. (a child born at midnight on the winter solstice the year that lines up with a full moon, is probably significantly more likely to inherit sorcery from their Winter Court fairy ancestor than their granddad that was born some random day in the summer.)
Even on the macro level it might allow for such situations as Susan Sto Helit who have a few supernatural abilities and tricks as a direct result of being Death’s granddaughter, despite her mother being adopted
Weird to me that “sorcerer” seems to be an umbrella term for all kinds of weirdness (at least in PF1e terms). I guess you could read it as “magic that attaches itself to a family” rather than “inheritable genetic trait.”
The way I see it, it’s an inheritable trait (the ability to perform magic inherently), but that inheritance doesn’t have to have anything to do with genes.
Loads of things are inherited that aren’t genetic after all (farms or royalty or family names). The ability to perform magic just happens to be harder to take/give away than most of the non-genetic one of those.
Starting in 4E, and continuing into 5E WotC tried to move away from “Your gran boned a ___” as the origins for planetouched and Sorcerers. Tieflings par example were no-longer “Your gran boned a Devil” but rather “One of your ancestors made a pact with a devil and now your bloodline is cursed to occasionally cause its descendants to be born as Tieflings”. (Enjoy the social stigma for your descendants Fiend-locks) In my home-setting Tieflings are over-represented in the church due to popping up in noble families, and being really scandalous; they’re often abandoned in church-run orphanages. Of course due to the general stigma they are often kept in lower-ranks. In fact according to Mordenkainen’s Devils don’t have the equipment for that. Demons have equipment, and it is often horrifying. That’s why Graz’zt defected from the Devils to become a Demon Lord: He wanted a dong.
Sorcerers have all manner of origins suggested for their bloodline beyond “My gran boned a Dragon” such as getting a Dragon-blood-transfusion, being magically experimented on, having been cured of a Slaadi-infection, your pregnant mum having stumbled into the Shadowfell, etc.
I generally prefer all of this to “Your grandpa is a what?!”
That feels appropriately petty and banal. More terrifying elder evils need motivations like that!
Anyways, the idea of non-blood-related magical origins is one I like. Anything that makes the fantasy eugenicists less right is a plus in my book.
“Worth it!” -Graz’zt.
In a world where magical bloodlines are a thing any Sorcerer past the first generation of the bloodline would be super-inbred to avoid diluting said bloodline. Habsburg jaws for all of them!
I mean, there would definitely be magical Habsburgs (or Ptolmeys), but not all of them would. Sorcerer-kings, sure, they’re going full Ptolmeic Dynasty if there aren’t enough sorcerer-dynasties (or convenient sorceress-peasants) around, but sorcerer-nobodies would probably rather have healthy kids and a spouse they love than somewhat more magically powerful kids and spouse.
That is an amusing premise. You could actually use the Habsburg portraits for character art in an NPC sorcerer dynasty.
I wonder if Demon Queen knows if Thief got hitched (was she invited to the wedding, or present via Antipaladin proxy?). And to Elvish nobility no less – very useful for spreading corruption among mortals.
Honestly, Wizard should be in that photo too – she’s family now, formally.
Weird. It’s almost as if there’s a snub happening….
Thief has the last name of Fienderson, huh? I wonder if she kept it for her marriage, or if she took on Wizards family title.
Hm…take the name of an elven noble house, or keep being called Fienderson, the least suspicious name this side of “I. M. Giltie.”
It would be one thing if Thief was close to her family, but she doesn’t seem to be.
In the immortal words of Mr. Owl: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/I/619wDKC88-L._AC_UX385_.jpg
Pathfinder generally has the usual ‘your bloodline intermingled with an extraplanar creature’ but it also has a sort of planar taint-
the plane of Shadow, for example has a habit of infecting anyone unlucky enough to live on it for an extended period of time. Humans born on the shadow plane tend to be a sort of blighted half-humans who dislike the light.
There’s also a somewhat lesser-used note on lore that a parent’s alignment can affect their child, if it is severe enough. Parents of great evil can spontaneously birth tieflings or rakshasa, even if there is no outside influence on their bloodline, and the same is true for good parents and Aasimar.
Then there’s our Neutral planar scions: Duskwalkers. Not born, but created. When a neutral deity (generally Pharasma, or one of her powerful servitors) needs a messenger to the prime material, she selects a soul that has been judged. This soul is brought back to the material world. The soul manifests as a child of about 8 years old (Or the equivalent of the age, for other ancestries) at a graveyard or other place where the dead are buried. They are ‘born’ with a task (not that they’re told what it is, but fate works in mysterious ways) but are otherwise free to do as they please.
I’m intrigued by the idea of “infection.” You see it with the concept of “native outsiders” on the material plane as well.
Alright, running down the common fiendish templates/etc:
Half-fiends are literally just that. Your mama was an elf and your daddy was a balrog, or whatever.
Fiend-bloodline sorcerers and the like are more distant descendants of fiends, who can tap into their fiendish blood (or who get magic power some other way, attribute that to their demon ancestor, and that assumption taints their magic).
Fiendish creatures aren’t actually fiend-blooded; they’re more akin to minor outsiders, animals or people or whatever composed of a plane’s essence, in part or in whole.
Tieflings are what happens when you stick anyone with a hint of fiendish blood or infernal curse in a ghetto until their descendants develop their own culture and phenotype.
As for aludemons and cambions, foocubi are just unique I guess. They’re literally evil-sex incarnate, it’s not surprising that the kids they have with humanoids are unique.
Makes me wonder if there are other similarly unique outsiders. Sex and reproduction make sense for incubi and succubi, but are there other weird extra-planars that produce unique mortal descendants?
Anything with an identity/”theme” centered around reproduction or family, I’d imagine. Foocubi are just the only outsiders like that that actually got written (to my knowledge).
Which is kind of a shame! For all that fantasy has tried to move past the icky implications and outright bigotry in much of the medieval folklore at the root of its inspirations, there are some things the genre can’t seem to shake. While Golarion isn’t as puritanical about, say, sex as Hays-Code-era movies, AFAICT its only sex-related beings are the wicked incarnations of lust which suck people’s souls along with their genitalia. That’s about as sex-negative you can get—I’m pretty sure literal negative energy is involved!
Might be worth expanding a little. I think there could be a reproduction-y outsider type for each extreme alignment if we wanted.
LG: Modeled after the nuclear family. Mommy and Daddy come together to have kids, who obey their wise and loving parents. Perhaps they’re sent to people who want kids but can’t have them for some reason.
CG: Free love; more maenad than succubus, but same general gist. More of a communal attitude towards parenting.
CE: Probably the closest to the traditional foocubus, but less seductive/deceptive and more…forceful. They take what they want and leave you with the consequences. Rather than being drained because they stole something from you, you’re drained because of what they beat out of (or into) you.
LE: Like LG, except not so loving—think less Father Knows Best and more Taming of the Shrew. Devils that seek to control specific mortals, seeding devil-blooded dynasties shaped to their needs.
I like my fantasy crazy. Are we playing Medieval Life Simulator, or we Playing Dungeons and Dragons (sometimes with a side of Bards and Bodegos)? But let’s answer the question: No matter how you rule it, isn’t it always in service of the story?
At my table, you align yourself with forces through your actions and choices. Based on those things, I take on the approximate role of Mephisto, point out what you’re doing, and basically push you to go further. I like characters that substantively change over a journey, and a key feature of that is making someone realize their character isn’t quite who they were. Under this method, you earn your celestial/fiendish blood, and to me, it has the feeling of something out of an epic tale. Gather round and hear the story of how Barg Warcrest became our mighty, fiend blooded chieftain.
It’s less about being born with some blood flowing through your veins and more about what you’re doing with it, who you serve. What’s your motive.
If we want to look at this from the blood in the veins perspective… There are only two ways, and it gets a little muddled with fertility gods/goddesses, particularly Lamashtu.
1) Direct lineage from an extraplanar being. Even distant lineage, but something you can trace.
2) I am really a fan of the ‘blood brothers’ concept, particularly for fiends (we tend to think of celestials being more civilized than this). You and a whatever cut yourselves and press the wound together. For my money, you’ve just entered into a literal blood pact and are now bound with all its wonder and horror together.
3) Born in a Fertility cult, especially if you have any of the marks of divine favor (whatever they may be). It’s a little complicated, and frequently wishy washy with cults like this, and sure, it may not be enough extraplanar blood to be even a half blood. But if your birth was blessed by a such a being, why wouldn’t you be part of such a bloodline?
The idea of entering a bloodline through deeds is interesting. You literally shape yourself through your actions. That taps into the ur-theme of D&D where you grow and change by earning XP.
Exactly my thought, but it’s not ‘merely’ deeds. It is also to some degree channeling your target extraplanar and their auspices. I like the idea of everyone starting out normal and very visibly ‘evolving’ over the adventure. The downside of course is that it’s pretty heavy on GM involvement, but the way I figure it, we’re always picking what things we emphasize at our tables.
Conceptually, playing a normal person with no signifiers to their birth-someone who climbs, scrapes, scraps, and overcomes obstacles to a position of glory is far more interesting than being merely BORN with such auspices.
A high fantasy Ars Mag campaign I’m in had its own ideas to explain away all the classical and custom crossbreed (centaur, mermaid, tree-man, hippogriff, rock-people, etc.); basically wizard radiations. Like at some point in the very distant past there was a sort of magical Chernobyl? And this killed a lot of people but the survivors were often mutated, mutations that ranged from the purely cosmetic like “I guess my skin color has a sort of sickly greenish tinge now” to “I’m literally made out of fire now (that sucks, I really wanted to finish that book)”.
And the places where mages gather to study and practice magic tend to develop magical auras that warp the people who live there — and especially those who grow up there.
In D&D terms you’d easily justify the equivalent of a planetouched by being born in a wizard village, while for the half-something templates you’d need to trace your ancestry to a victim of the Magical Chernobyl Incident.
Well now you’ve got me curious. What was the nature of this ‘magical Chernobyl?’
Something about demons breaking in a super-magical fabled city (now lost) and shattering its super-magical artifact heart, bringing an end to a mythical golden age…
It’s kind of like the stuff that the Forgotten Realms have regularly, really: Fall of Netheril, Time of Trouble, Spellplague, etc.
I kinda lean towards the ‘magic did it’ to explain a lot of the planetouched in my world. Like a village will produce more fire genasi because the Material plane and the Plane of fire are close in that particular location and the essence of the planes intermingle. And so on for the other extraplanar subtypes. Plus the occasional story of an ancestral getting freaky.
As for magic-granting bloodlines then you can get it the old-fashioned way, magic granting ritual, transfusion from a powerful magical creature, etc.
It’s almost like magical radiation is causing magical (for lack of a better word) birth defects.
“And how do I transition from “outsider” to outsider with the native subtype?”
You need to go to section three and ask the brunette woman, Karen, yes Karen, for the form B8/4 – Prime Material Plane residency. Fill it with your info and once presented your case will be considered 🙂
KARRREEEEEEN!
https://media1.giphy.com/media/KeTVw7VjcTJok/200.gif
In my games, I’ve had half-dragons be children of dragons; quarter-dragons use the half-dragon template with some reductions; generations after that are either normal for their race or draconic in some way (this works better in 3.5 where there’s a Draconic creature template).
I do something similar for Tieflings/Aasimar. At least in Forgotten Realms lore, Tieflings breed true, meaning a tiefling parent will ALWAYS have tiefling children. The only thing keeping their numbers low is the social ostracization that they endure.
So in my games, Tieflings and Aasimar breed true, and are at least great-grandchildren of their Planar ancestor. Because only bound creatures or planar travel can result in planar-descended children, and bindings are highly dangerous, exceptionally rare, and incredibly illegal in my setting, Aasimar and Tieflings are even rarer.
Which results in some measure of “nobility” to them, with various lineages claiming Fiendish or Celestial ancestors and that ancestry granting them a measure of divine right to rule.
So tieflings and aasimar are just more diluted half- creatures? Is there any other way for them to come into existence?
In one of my current setting Tieflings are a created species. They are born when someone travels the Blood river, a river of blood and souls that snakes its way through a valley of bones and enters the Temple of Serul, an ancient bonelike being. There they make a bargain with Serul where they ask him to create a tiefling to fulfill a specific purpose, such as killing someone, defending a place or cleaning their home. In exchange they supply him with three sacrifices, whose flesh, blood and souls he adds to the river. From the foul mixture that is his river he crafts the tieflings soul, body and mind.
So all tieflings are created for a specific purpose, but most fulfill theirs rather quickly and are often just left to wander around. They are uncommon, but not exactly rare, as there are many entrances to the river. They are sterile through.
As for my Aasimars, they are not the children of celestials, but someone who has been blessed from birth by a higher power. Their children will also be aasimar, if the higher power finds them worthy. What exactly decides whatever or not a specific baby will be worthy is a mystery to most.
I almost forgot, my githyanki lays eggs in living creatures, akin to wasps. The more powerful the creature, the more powerful the children will be. So they take to hunt powerful planar beings, like devils or angles, to use as incubators.
My players struck a strong friendship with a clan of them because they gifted them a ring of regeneration. Allowing the Gith to keep using the same devil. Who just happened to be the orchestra of one of the players family ruin and and a general bringer of misfortune upon the party.
Huh. Kind of sounds like tieflings-as-warforged. Neat!
I gather this was not a good-aligned party, lol.
My headcanon for Tieflings and Asimar is that an outsider just gives the old “And Me!” at the start, and then you get a planar-ish character. When you get down to it, fantasy stories just sometimes kick logic out of the moving train getting us nonsense like a character who is 1/3 elf, so why the hell not?
I do not understand this euphemism, but my imagination is painting worrying pictures.
As it should.
Funnily enough, the character I’m currently working on is my elf sorcerer. He’s a party of my family party where everyone is related. I’m not sure what bloodline to go with though. I need both an arcane caster and trapfinding so I went with the Seeker archetype.
The last character I’ll have to do after this is the half-elf slayer.
Bloodline is an easy story hook if you want it.
You’ll also want to find a bloodline with a good spell list and a relatively weak 3rd level bloodline ability that you don’t mind trading. Psychic, arcane, and verdant could all be strong.
I’m considering either Solar or Shadow. Solar has some decent spells and gets Perception as a class skill. While Shadow has gets Stealth as a class skill and the thought of the elf being all about darkness while the drow in the family is all about sunshine (nature-based character) is kinda funny.
Anyhoo… Now we know why Antipaladin was invited to Thief and Wizard’s wedding, when no one else in the Evil Party was.
I wonder whether Thief thinks of Antipaladin as family by adoption, or just as a very good friend of the family.
I also wonder how Demon Queen will react when she finds out ‘Thiefy’ got married and she wasn’t invited — although all the holy rites surrounding the event would probably have made it uncomfortable for her to attend, to say the least. Maybe that was an ulterior reason to invite Antipaladin; he could shoot the wedding film and hand it over to his boss later.
Gotta take notes for the boss lady, even if she’s technically unable to cross into the material plane: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/devils-night
Come to think of it, Wizard meeting Granny would be a great plot thread to pick up, wouldn’t it.
Technically, this already happened once: https://www.handbookofheroes.com/archives/comic/family-ties
This reminds me of a “War for the Crown” scenario I once came up with. I tried to give all the claimants legitimate reasons to be doubted, so the conflict makes sense. The obvious heir is the king’s eldest daughter, but she is visibly not fully human. The official story (including from the dead king) was always that she was an aasimar, whose unusual features demonstrate the blessing of the gods upon the bloodline. (Aphorite is also a possibility.) But a lot of people have suspected for a long time that she’s really just the product of infidelity by the queen, making her not actually the king’s daughter and therefore not eligible for the throne. The reality is sort of a mix, as she IS their legitimate daughter, but a hag or other powerful otherworldly force magically altered her in order to use her as a puppet to take over the kingdom – a plan ironically put in jeopardy by the alterations. (The other claimants are the king’s previously-thought-dead-but-actually-alive son, who many believe correctly to be an imposter, and a noble with army backing but a much weaker biological connection. The moral, like all such stories, is presumably that monarchy sucks and you should have a republic.)
One of my campaigns has a major NPC who probably should be a half-fiend but I have always listed as “tiefling.” She was conceived in a ritual with the Infernal Duke of exploitative capitalism as her father and trained by her devil-worshiping family in secret to be a master of Infernal contract magic, but she’s actually split off and become an independent, selling infernal magic and renting the service of devils to anyone who will pay her. Which actually suits her family just fine (they can summon their own devils), though relationships with her two half-sisters are usually strained. This NPC proved to be an important part of a tiefling NPC’s backstory, as she eventually revealed to him that his mother died in an accident and his father paid the NPC for a resurrection… but being the cheapest available resurrection, the wife was infused with infernal essence (which she passed on to her son when he was born) and spent the rest of her life in hiding. Probably a lesson in there somewhere.
Vive la Galt!
When you said “unethically sourced frog legs” I thought it was gonna be a link to the villain from The Muppet Movie
Heh. Doc Hopper the hezrou demon has some potential….
I tend to think of half-fiends like mules. They’re a mixing of two distinct species that don’t breed true. Half-fiends don’t make more half-fiends. Tieflings come from more closely-related progenitors and therefore they are their own distinct species that can breed true. Sorcerers have a demon ancestor somewhere in the line and half-fiends and/or tieflings in their family tree, but their family bred with their own original species again to the point that now only a trace of that fiendish lineage remains.
Makes me wonder about the maximum amount of “fiendish” a tiefling can have.
In my system it’s simple.
Everything can breed with everything, but will generally only have a small chance of birthing a mule-race that is genetically sterile. Otherwise the child only has a chance at being a full-race matching that of the mother giving birth, unless the parent is Orc or Goblinoid, in which case a full-race matching the orc/goblinoid parent is possible.
Humans are the big outlier; as is the trope, their superpower is basically the ability to breed with anything else humanoid, and almost always get a breeding-capable race as the offspring. They can even breed with some things not humanoid (though that will just about always be a mule race result)
In general, Elves and Orcs are the only ones that get a consistently breed-viable options when mixed with humans.
There are no “quarter breeds” If a half-breed mixes with one of its parents’ race, then the offspring will function as a fullbreed of the race they mixed with. “Half orc + orc = orc” If a half breed mixes with a race that is compatible with one of its parents’ race, then the offspring will function as a simple half breed; “Half-Orc + Elf = Human+Elf = Half-Elf.
Half-Dwarf would technically be a thing, but I haven’t decided on any specifics for what that would look like. It still rare just due to cultural preferences being so different.
Tiefling, Aasimar, and Genasi are all essentially mutations, no matter what race the parents are, they just are, and for breeding purposes they function entirely as whatever the parents would normally have, but the mutation just generally can crop up in any following generation.
There are things like Dwelfs(dwarf+elf), Orchalfs(orc+elf), and Dworcs(dwarf+orc) are mules, which is why they never get mentioned as a race.
Halflings, Gnomes, Goblins all basically have the same compatibility to each other as Dwarf, Elf, and Orc respectively.
Kobold, Dragonborn, and Lizardfolk are compatible, mother determines full race of offspring. Mules possible.
All goblinoid can breed with other goblinoid, and the mother decides the full race of the offspring, no mules possible.
Arakokra and Kenku can breed, mother decides full race of offspring, no mules possible.
Goliath, Firbolg, and Orc are compatible, mothers ALWAYS decide full race of offspring, ignores Orc preference.
Tabaxi and Leonin are compatible. Mother determines full race of offspring, no mules are possible.
Triton, Minotaur, Centaur, and Satyr are all compatible, mother determines full race of offspring. No mules are possible.
Gnomes and Elves can mix with various fey creatures. This almost always results in a fey offspring, though it may appear as a gnome/elf until it is an adult.
The other big outliers are Dragons, who can genuinely breed with anything and get a viable “half-dragon” result, which in turn can breed with a full dragon to get full dragon offspring.
Gods are similar, but though they can breed with anything, they generally count as being the same race as the parent (for ease if compatibility) and the offspring will simply be the same race as the non-god-parent, but also have a divine seed on top of that (though frequently dormant, unless the god-parent wills it otherwise. Aasimar and Tieflings can awaken this seed themselves though willpower or various rituals)
That’s the trope, but I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a setting really take advantage of that. What about a vision of humanity that incorporates their diverse human-descendants like the Galra from Voltron:
https://voltron.fandom.com/wiki/Galran
The power of souls enables compatible crossbreeding between all creatures.
Ona deeper level, planar creatures are measured by how much essence of the dimension they have in their souls. Pure ones have souls made up of it, others manifest either because of interbreeding or being imbued with that soul essence.
I just realized something. Wizard should be there too. Since she’s married to Thief, she’s part of the family.
Also, I’m working on another family group. This time, I’m going with all the technically half-human races – Sylph, Undine, Tiefling, and so on.