>Aeon,
>
>You're opening yourself up for a world of hurt, there. The author's idea
>was to make a simple division. Now you're talking about races and
>mixed-race and culture and sub-culture. At that point, you might was well
>use a life-cycle type system for "special" modifiers.
I came into this thread a bit late so I may have missed the system specific
portion of it. I meant to comment more on the overall logistics and reality of
subcultures (ie. that of half-elves) rather than on possible means of
implementation into the d20 system as a whole. Sorry if I was unclear.
If you're only interested in the systemic aspects of this, read no further. The
remainder of this email deals with non-system specific issues related to
half-elves.
I personally have not gone so far as to create a half-elf subculture. There are
arguments against it as well. Tanis from the Dragonlance books could be said to
have had no culture of his own, to an extent.
The larger issue (and I know I open myself up for assault here) is how many of a
type have to exist before we have to worry about cultural issues at all? To be
frank, WotC has worked to cushion the blow, so to speak, of the half-elf's
origin. It used to be that we all knew that a half-elf was a bastard (in the
dictionary sense of the word), the unfortunate victim of some nasty human male's
assault on an elf maiden. The new rulebook talks about how when a daddy human
and a mommy human fall in love and get married, they have half-elf babies.
This slides slightly away from the point I'm trying to make, which is that there
are unlikely to be great numbers of half-elves wandering around in any game
world. In a population of a million, perhaps a dozen or so half-elves. I don't
think that human-elf marriages are likely to be too common (all this goes for
half-orcs as well). With such a small number, cultural issues are hardly a
concern to begin with. One is an outcast, sans culture, based on one's almost
insignificant presence among "betters". The trials of Elric are a good example
of not fitting in (though Elric is not a half-elf, of course).
A better question (probably better suited to a different thread) would be if
half-elves and half-orcs can breed, and if they produce more of their own kind
or not. Unless half-elves can propogate their own species, it's very difficult
to pass down knowledge and habit through the generations, and hence, to develop
a culture that lasts longer than a century or so.
The Player's Handbook dances around the issue like so:
"Most half-elves are the children of human-elf pairings. Some,
however, are the children of parents who themselves are partly
human and partly elven. Some of these "second-generation" half-
elves have humanlike eyes, but most still have green eyes."
This raises more questions for me than it answers. What exactly does "partly
human and partly elven" mean? Why not just say "half-elven"? Are there
quarter-elves? Why the emphasis on "second generation"? Is there not a third
generation? Or is the blood so thin at that point that one is essentially either
human or elven? The suggestion is the latter, which reaffirms my earlier point
-- that perhaps half-elves fade away so quickly that there's no time to create a
true cultural heritage.
I apologize for being verbose. I will refrain from such habits as much as
possible in the future. :>
And yes, I realize that my statement here seems to contradict my earlier
statement arguing in favor of half-elf culture. Call me devil's advocate,
if you will. I've been called worse.
________________________________________________________________________
"Moralists have always wondered helplessly why Poe's 'morbid' tales need
have been written. They need to be written because old things need to die
and disintegrate, because the old write psyche has to be gradually broken
down before anything else can come to pass. Man must be stripped even of
himself. And it is a painful, sometimes a ghastly process."
-- D.H. Lawrence, on E.A. Poe
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