Quote Originally Posted by Quizatzhaderac View Post
Eusocial mammals exist, the naked mole ratWhere most females never go through puberty and most males just never get to participate in sex.

The population wouldn't be stable throughout history, and would need to be able to recover from plagues/ wars/ famines/ et cetra so they'd need to be able to, on occasion, have much more than replacement levels of children. Something like 4 litters per matriarch.

In normal times 2 liters would be the norm with one or three not being uncommon.

Being sapient they will exercise some control over their birth rates. This is something all cultures do and was probably done by Neanderthals and other almost humans.

The one in 4 males surviving raises questions. Biologically, there would be no reason males to be more fragile than kliba since they have the body plan in their genes; so there would need to be special dangers. One such possibility would be if they were like roosters where the males basically kill each other on sight. Another would be that most males aren't "good enough" due to weakness or insubordination and are castrated/ killed, or exiled.

These explanations are pretty horrible, but pretty much anything where you lose 3/4 of a population will be.

If you want your society to not be terrible, I'd recommend that male puberty only happens occasionally with the following genders:
Matriarchs, studs (fertile males), genetically female kliba, genetically male kliba, girls (juvenile females that could become either matriarchs or kliba), and boys.
My thinking is as follows--

* The halfling race is both small (so genetically bottlenecked intrinsically) and not traditionally "evolved". They came into being due to (basically) magical fallout. They also hit an external bottleneck (catastrophe that killed ~70% of everyone) ~ 250 years ago. So their genetics are rather bizarre.
* There's a "fragile X" problem--basically those with male genetics tend to be simply stillborn/miscarried more frequently than not, and if they are born, they are often weak and die in childhood. Females with this fragile X problem end up looking like female eunuchs, females except without functional reproductive anatomy who go through an altered "puberty" (gaining physical size but not sexual maturity). So physiologically kliba are females...except without functional ovaries or other sexual characteristics.

As for the litter rate--my idea for their society is "we have reserves/human wave" style zerg-rushes when threatened. They tend to overproduce in times of societal stress (or in general), but don't consider kliba lives all that meaningful. Nor are they super individualistic (although that's changing)--the default is to think of the family first, then worry about the individual. Coupled with their (genetic) resistance to fear (they just don't experience it quite the same way), and you have a rather messed up culture.

Which is somewhat of the intentional point--all my cultures have some form of screwy-ness built in. High elves of one culture are intentionally selectively breeding for magical power (causing all sorts of dislocations). Many dwarves are so traditional that doing something new is literally considered suicide; they're also pair bonded at an extreme level--almost always born as twins, 1 male, 1 female, and aren't considered adults until they're married, and divorce/adultery/widowhood are basically the same thing, and frequently result in the suicide of the other partner (either directly or through extreme risk-seeking behavior). The dwarven word for "widow/divorcee" is the same as the word for "broken." Each of the human cultures has quirks and oddities--the human-dominant cultures are among the only really religiously-zealot-driven cultures. Etc.