Author: Morrigan (---.56.1)
Date: 05-02-2002 15:22
This particular column is written about the human female's fertility cycle but a lot of games deal with non-humans. Fantasy games like D&D and Earthdawn have semi-human races like Elves, Dwarves and Halflings and even non-human races like the Obsidiman and T'skrang of Earthdawn. SF games such as Star Wars, Star Trek and Traveler often have alien races like Klingons, Wookies and Hivers. Not only do these races often have different biologies they usually have different cultures and attitudes (which one can argue come as a result of those divergent biologies). An example:
In an Earthdawn game I ran for several years one of the major characters was a male Elven Weaponsmith. In the first year of the game he met a female Elven Questor (Priestess) of Upandal (the god of smiths). They hit it off rather well (being both builders) even though she was about a hundred years older than him. As time went on he learned more about her life and history (she had a twin sister who was a priestess of the goddess of art and love, she was a war hero and was responsible for, with her sister, taking down a massive floating fortress without any additional support, she was the daughter of a queen of the Elven nation, etc. etc. etc.) and they fell in love and decided to marry. To make a long story short it was a beautiful ceremony with lots of fun RP. After that the player was in a bit of a quandry: should he continue to adventure with the party (who were, at the time, trying to save the world of course) or stay home and help his wife run her temple. In the end she solved the problem by simply saying: 'We're Elves. We live five hundred years. Do you really think I want to spend everyday of the rest of my life with you? I'd go mad! Go ahead and save the world. We have plenty of time.'. After that, everytime he came home he went to spend time with her.
So, basically, I had to think of things from a cultural perspective - how would a race that lived several centuries deal with life-bonding? In this case I decided they were pretty patient and often went months without seeing each other. After all, even in short-lived human lives couples often take breaks from on another and need their alone time. Next I had to think of things from a biological perspective - if Elves were as fertile as humans *and* lived for several centuries there would be a great number of Elves. Generally, in nature, the longer lived a mammalian species is the fewer children they have (dogs and cats have 4-10 at a time while humans and horses tend to only have one at a time). I decided, in the end, that either I could introduce what I call the 'Vulcan solution' where Elven females are only fertile every so often (7 years in the case of Vulcans) or I could have a more normal fertility cycle and decrease the odds of a woman being able to conceive. I chose the second option and gave them a base ten percent chance that, during a home visit, she would become pregnant with their child (isn't it silly to call it 'his child'?). That number went up to as high as twelve percent if it was closer to her peak time (as was noted in the article, females tend to have specific windows of increased fertility) or down to 8 percent if it was farther away. In the end they didn't produce any children during the campaign but had a set of beautiful twins after the game ended.
For a while the party had a T'skrang and that was a completely different story. T'skrang, if you don't know, are basically lizard people from D&D mixed with a little Three Musketeers and H.M.S. Pinafore flash. They don't give live birth but, like many reptiles, lay eggs. I had to decide how often the female T'skrang in the party was 'fertile' (i.e. she developed eggs). In the end I basically gave her a twenty percent chance, per month, of developing eggs. If, during a month where she was developing eggs she had a sexual encounter with a male T'skrang there was a 50 percent chance some of the eggs would fertilize. Unfertilized or not she had to push the eggs out of her body if they developed. It was a bit simplistic, yes, but it worked well in a game context.
Just some examples of how to think about fertility and life-bonding outside of the human context.
Morrigan
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