Half-Elf Genetics in Dungeons & Dragons : An Alternative View

by Anton Markwart (Markwart.Anton@gmail.com)

Introduction

Half-elves have a basis in Norse mythology. Tolkien borrowed the concept in his writings. Dungeons & Dragons borrowed the concept from Tolkien, along with many other Tolkien concepts.

For a Dungeons & Dragons player, the opportunity to play a character somewhat in between a regal yet delicate elf and an oafish yet resilient human might seem to be tantalizing.

For a mature adult, the opportunity to pursue a sexual fantasy—in addition to the power fantasy of slaying dragons and overcoming other mythical obstacles—is also tantalizing. Indeed, tales of sexual conquest, romance, and seduction are also as old as Norse and ancient Greek legend, a tradition carried through medieval tales, and a popular topic in pulp fiction and romance novels in the modern era.

Where half-elves come from should be somewhat intuitive: an elf and a human mate. But what happens when the half-elf mates? Put simply, we know where the half-elf's lineage comes from, but where does it go?

In this document, I propose a simple, clear-cut mechanism for use by Dungeons & Dragons (and other game systems, as applicable) Game Masters, based on actual human genetics.

Source Documents

The Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook Core Rulebook I v.3.5 summarizes Half-Elves with these relevant passages:

“Humans and elves sometimes wed... These marriages end quickly as elves count years because a human's life is so brief, but they leave an enduring legacy—half-elf children.

“The life of a half-elf can be hard. If raised by elves, the half-elf seems to grow with astounding speed, reaching maturity within two decades... Typically, she leaves her elven home, which is no longer familiar, and finds her way among humans.

“If, on the other hand, she is raised by humans, the half-elf finds herself different from her peers: more aloof, more sensitive, less ambitious, and slower to mature. Most find places for themselves in human lands, but some feel like outsiders all their lives.

“Most half-elves are the children of human-elf pairings. Some, however, are the children of parents who themselves are partly human and partly elf [emphasis mine]. Some of these “second generation” half-elves have humanlike eyes, but most still have green eyes.

“Half-elves have no lands of their own [emphasis mine], though they are welcome in human cities and elven forests. In large cities, half-elves sometimes form small communities of their own.”

[The Dungeons & Dragons Player's Handbook Core Rulebook I v.3.5 ed. By Julia Martin and John Ratliff, p. 18]

The Book of Erotic Fantasy by Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel and Duncan Scott (a 3rd-party sourcebook compliant with the OGL) elaborates on Half-Elves with this:

“Half-elves tend to have difficult puberties. If raised among elves, they reach sexual maturity long before their peers. Their childhood friends are too young and immature to understand the half-elf... Half-elves lack sexual opportunities in elven society...

“If among humans, half-elves mature slowly. They sustain childhood interests longer than their human companions and do not mature as quickly sexually... Her contemporaries reject her...

“As there is no half-elf society [emphasis mine] per se, the mother will receive care from others based on the community that she belongs to...

“Half-elves that get pregnant give birth to “true” members of either race [emphasis mine] . For example, a half-elf gets pregnant by a human—the child will be born as a human... In short, there are no “quarter-elves” [emphasis mine], although the child will gain physical traits similar to her parents—a child of a half-elf and a human will have slightly more pointed ears and a slender build.

“...if a half-elf mates with an elf and gives birth, the child will be born an elf, despite its “three-quarters” blood. Other than cosmetic differences, including sleight variations of height, weight, hair color, and so on, the child will have the same abilities as a full-blooded member of that race.”

[The Book of Erotic Fantasy by Gwendolyn F.M. Kestrel and Duncan Scott, pp 25-26]

Analysis

Both source documents make it clear that unlike mules (sterile hybrid offspring between horses and donkeys), half-elves are fertile: according to Kestrel and Scott, if a half-elf mates with a human, the offspring is effectively human (with slightly elven features); and if the half-elf mates with an elf, the offspring is effectively elven (with slightly human features). Kestrel and Scott specify that there neither “quarter-elves” nor “three-quarter-elves” possible.

Vexingly, however, the offspring of a half-elf and another half-elf is not explicitly specified, and nor are rules for half-elf gene transmission; neither by Martin and Ratliff nor by Kestrel and Scott. This is particularly disturbing because half-elves are social and sexual misfits, and misfits tend to seek out similar misfits: in other words, although opposites sometimes attract, one would expect a half-elf to have an immediate psychological attraction to another half-elf (“I've searched my entire life for someone who understands what it's like to be a half-elf”), once they got beyond their denial and self-loathing. In fact, I can imagine a half-elf turning to a life of adventure expressly for the purpose of finding a mate.

Logically, one might expect the offspring of 2 half-elves to always be half-elf. However, Kestrel and Scott specify that: “[h]alf-elves that get pregnant give birth to ‘true’ members of either race.” Does this mean that the offspring of 2 half-elves will be either human or elf, but never half-elf? And what of Martin and Ratliff's oblique comment that “some [half-elves] are the children of parents who themselves are partly human and partly elf?”

I submit that the fact that there are no other fractions of elvenness possible suggests that there is a single “elf gene” that determines “elven blood” for game purposes; if this is the case, then the laws of genetics suggest different possibilities for half-elf offspring.

Human Genetics on Earth

To understand what I am talking about, consider the real-world example of sickle-cell anemia and the sickle-cell trait. There are 3 possibilities in humans regarding sickle-cell anemia: a human can be “normal” regarding sickle-cell anemia, a human can be a carrier for sickle-cell anemia, and a human can be “anemic” with sickle-cell anemia. This stems from genetics: there is a “normal” version of the sickle-cell gene, which keeps red blood cells stable all the time; and there is the “sickle-cell” version of the sickle-cell gene, which can cause a red blood cell to turn sickle-shaped. These different versions of the same gene are called “alleles”. Every person has 2 copies of this gene, so if a person has 2 copies of the “normal” allele, then they never experience sickle-cell anemia; if they have 1 normal and 1 sickle-cell copy, they are genetic “carriers” for sickle-cell anemia and experience the disease only rarely; but if they have 2 copies of the sickle-cell gene, then they have sickle-cell anemia.

When humans mate, each parent contributes a copy of one of these genes, chosen at random. If a “normal” person (2 normal alleles) mates with a “carrier” person (1 normal and 1 sickle-cell alleles), then each parent randomly contributes one of their alleles. The “normal” person can only contribute normal alleles, but 50% of the time the “carrier” is likely to contribute a normal allele, and 50% of the time the “carrier” is likely to contribute a sickle-cell allele. As a result, there is a 50-50 chance that the offspring of a “normal” person and a “carrier” will be either “normal” or a “carrier”.

Geneticists can visually represent this distribution with a "Punnett square":

Thus, there are 4 equally likely possibilities for offspring: 2 possibilities are “Normal,” whereas 2 possibilities are “Carriers”. If parent 1 and parent 2 mate, then for each child, there is a 2 in 4 probability that their child will be “Normal,” and a 2 in 4 probability that their child will be a “Carrier.” Theoretically, it is possible for these parents to mate several times and find the offspring of every mating is “Normal,” just as it is theoretically possible for someone to flip a coin several times and find the result comes up “Heads,” but it is less and less likely the more times they mate/flip.

Offspring probabilities become more complex between 2 carriers:

Here, there are also 4 equally likely possibilities for offspring: 1 possibility is “Normal”, 2 possibilities are “Carriers”, and 1 possibility is “Anemic.” In terms of probability, there is a 25% chance that a child of these parents will be “Normal”, a 50% chance that a child of these parents will be a “Carrier”, and a 25% chance that the child will be “Anemic.”

I do not wish to compare Elvism (or Humanity) to a disease; I use the well-studied and widely-known genetics of Sickle-Cell Anemia as a fairly simple example of how genes are transmitted in human beings. I could have similarly used an example of pea blossom color genetics, but I wanted to choose an example that indicates that these laws of genetic inheritance do work in human beings, and also indicate that it is possible for each allele to be expressed in offspring with one of each allele.

How Human Genetics May Apply to Half-Elf Genetics

Now that we know how human genetic inheritance works, I want to transfer what I have explained to the possible genetics of humans, elves, and half-elves. Similarly to sickle-cell anemia, there are only 3 possibilities regarding elvenness in gaming terms: a character is human, elf, or half-elf. Unlike hair color, in which there are many subtle color variations between albino-white, blonde, red, brunette, and black hair; there are no subtle variations between the 3 races regarding “elven blood.” This suggests that one gene determines elvenness, with 2 alleles: human allele and elf allele.

It should be obvious that human-human offspring will be human, and elf-elf offspring will be elf. Human-elf offspring has been universally described as half-elf. Using the Punnett square tool, we can represent the offspring possibilities of a human and elf like so:

Thus, there is a 100% probability that their offspring will be half-elf.

What about a human and a half-elf?

Thus, assuming my hypothesis that “elven blood” is determined by 1 gene, and using standard genetics, there is a 50% chance that a child of a human and half-elf will be human, and a 50% chance that the child will be half-elf; similarly, there is a 50-50 chance that a child of elf and half-elf will be elf or half-elf. This differs with the Book of Erotic Fantasy, which declares that: “half-elves that get pregnant give birth to “true” members of either race.”

Things get more complex between 2 half-elves:

Thus, continuing with my hypothesis, there is a 25% chance that a child of 2 half-elves will be human, a 50% chance that a child will be half-elf, and a 25% chance that a child will be elf. It also meshes well with Martin and Ratliff's oblique comment that: “some [half-elves] are the children of parents who themselves are partly human and partly elf.”

Conclusions and Implications

If you have a Dungeons & Dragons game wherein a half-elf (or 2) mates, you now have a simple, clear-cut mechanism for determining the product of such a union (if any), based on reasonable assumptions and actual genetic rules from the real world, rather than an unqualified assertion.

In short, if conception occurs (bearing in mind that not every encounter results in pregnancy, and that elves are less likely to conceive than humans, etc.), determine the human/elf status of each parent, and then choose one of these 3 tables as appropriate:

Half-Elf & Human Parents:

Half-Elf & Half-Elf Parents:

Half-Elf & Elf Parents:

Kestrel and Scott describe details regarding human, half-elf, and elf gestation and childbirth, so you can give occasional clues to your player as to what their character's offspring will be like.

It is unfortunate that I must address this, but when discussing human genetics I fear that I must pre-emptively confront possible accusations of racism by vigorously denying any attempt to oppress or malign humans, elves, and certainly not half-elves. If anything, the above analysis counters the racist/eugenicist claim that multiracial offspring are irreversibly corrupt, because (according to my findings) half-elves are capable of producing offspring of “pure blood” in gaming terms.

Kestrel and Scott comment: “there is no half-elf society per se.” This begs the questions: although half-elves might come about only rarely because of human/elf social differences, once half-elves mate with each other, why must they continue to be rare? What is to prevent an entire society of half-elves from developing, given an arbitrarily large starting gene pool? The genetic analysis above suggests the answer: statistically, the offspring of two half-elves is only 50% likely to be half-elf. A population of half-elves can never be truly stable, because roughly 50% of the second generation is likely to be non-half-elf.

Future Work

I leave the companion work “Half-Orc Genetics: An Alternative View” as an exercise for the reader. However, this raises the questions: if Humans can mate with Elves, and Humans can mate with Orcs, why can Elves not mate with Orcs? Why can Half-Elves not mate with Half-Orcs? If there is an “Elf Gene,” is there a separate “Orc Gene,” or is Orcism yet another allele of the “Elf Gene?”

The Author Has Too Much Time On His Hands

Seriously, the reason there are no “quarter-elves” nor other fractions has to do with simplifying game rules. Who wants to deal with the abilities and vulnerabilities of a 1/16^th elf, or a 17/32^nd elf? Besides, “elven blood” (if it could ever exist) would surely be too complex to be described by a single gene.