"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 think that this has the potential to be a very limiting statement right here. I recently was reading a series of books (I don't have th book with me, and I'm only about half way and I forget the author... anyway) where there was a species refered to as Lirin which were quite obviously elven-like if not fully elves. In the main-world (there were some story tangents) the common Middle-Class race was a Half-Lirin. I know it's always been a common assumption for most game worlds that the main race was human.. but if you think about it, that was very much a function of the rule system. Human's didn't have racial modifiers so it was easy to make them ;-)
With that in mind, what's to stop the DM from creating something very much Colonial New Orleans where half-elves are the equivalent to what Mulato was in our world. It's really the perfect set up, especially were themajority of the PCs to decide that Half-Elven was the way they wanted to go.
Just some thoughts,
-Bill
