theme for a fantasy campaign

[tshiggins]

Originally Posted by whswhs

I can see, actually, at least two ways to get hybrids:

* The heroic myth approach: Beren alone of mortal men married an elf-woman, the sons of God desired the daughters of men, and so on.

* The urban realism approach: When people start coming to the emerging halfling city-states to trade, some of them stay, and perhaps intermarry, and whether through chance, drugs, or magic, some of them have children.

I'm not sure if they'd both work in the same storyline, though. Thoughts?

Bill Stoddard

Well, as I thought about the recent arrival of human beings, I figured one of the attractive possibilities was that the most powerful spirits from each habitat brought the humans, because they realized the world needed a facilitator race that didn't really fit in, anywhere.

It wouldn't necessarily have been a deliberate decision by a particular set of "gods," either. It could have come as a manifestation of the collective subconscious recognition of the need, by the specialized races.

The hybrid notion could work the same way. The subconscious recognition that, perhaps, the people had become too specialized "charges" the spirits to make healthy hybrids more frequent. The could make the Brett's stranden trading cities havens of fertility -- which has some interesting possibilities for the discussion of dwarven reproduction issues and stranden family strategy, too.

Perhaps large stranden trading cities are seen as licentious pits of social upheaval, filled with half-breeds of all sorts, who have the disturbing tendency to be really good at stuff the more traditional folk need doing?