# THOUGH WOULDN’T THAT TECHNICALLY QUALIFY AS WEIRD D&D NON-SEX STUFF?
Alright fine how about this: there’s no such thing as a Human. Or rather, human is a word from some ancient obscure dialect that roughly translates as ‘hybrid’ or ‘mutt’.
You ever wonder why all the really ancient civilizations, the ruins and stuff, are all dwarven or gnomish or snake people or whatever? Why Human empires are always the new kids on the block, usually with no explanation where they came from, while the elves are inevitably from an ancient culture with a million years of traditions who used to rule the planet but have been declining for longer than the GM bothered to write history for? Why human stats are always the average, with everybody else’s characters defined by which direction they deviate from that in?
Well, in any of the major races, you can divide people roughly into two groups.
The first group keeps to themselves. Maybe they don’t feel any need to leave home, maybe they prefer the company of people with similar characteristics to themselves, maybe they believe that their race is the greatest in the universe, whatever, point is they pretty much keep their culture self-contained and their bloodlines pure. I’m gonna call them ‘xenophobes’ for the sake of convenience, even though it sounds unfairly judgemental and most of them are perfectly nice folks just living simple quiet lives.
The second group feels the need to go out and explore the world (or conquer it), or maybe just wants to meet new people. Ima call them ‘xenophiles’; again not totally accurate in all cases but it’s a convenient term for the moment. And when they meet similar explorers from other cultures, they make friends. And then they make more than friends. And then they fuck. Sometimes nothing happens; an elf and, say, a lizardman or a kobold or whatever is too different, completely incompatible. But it turns out that an elf and a gnome can have kids just fine. And then one day, that gnelf falls in love with a dorc, and the resulting child comes out pretty damn close to a modern human.
Fast forward a thousand years. You have some rebel kids in any given ancient traditional culture group who want to strike out into the larger world, and some explorers who ultimately learn that what they really want is to settle down back in their ancestral lands, but in general all the xenophobes become more, well, xenophobic with their secret forest villages and sealed mountain fortresses and their racially-homogenous warbands. And on the other side, the xenophiles keep on fucking whatever can talk intelligibly enough to consent. Eventually they devolve into a sort of undifferentiated genetic slurry, which we call humanity.
The “average” human is probably mostly elf and orc and dwarf and gnome, but also has small but significant amounts of dragon, demon, angel, elemental, giant, merfolk, fey, and whatever else you care to imagine flowing through their veins. The half-elves and half-orcs and tieflings and aasimar and genasai and such are all still “human”, but with some specific part of their lineage displaying strongly enough to affect game stats some.
[”Halflings” arose from a similar process, but randomly stumbled into a sort of ‘local maximum’ of hybridization, where they ended up with a combination of traits that caused most of them to not want to bother with all that nasty ‘adventure’ business and instead form small, tight-knit communities around comfortable burrows, lavish meals, and high quality weed, so most of them sorta ‘returned’ to the xenophobe lifestyle. There’s some variation between them, like Tallfellows have more elf blood and Stouts have more dwarf blood, but nowhere near the degree of bizarre diversity you see within the main human population]
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