Owlbears and ENIACs

[TooManySecrets]

WARNING: This is mostly just a written account of what I've been thinking about recently. It meanders, makes a couple of logical jumps, and I can't guarantee that it will have a nice payoff. Oh well.

What does this ...

have to do with this?

I'll tell you in a bit, but first, let me digress.

It's often been said that the difference between science fiction and fantasy is that one has robots and the other has dragons and magic. In many senses this is true. The appeal of science and fantasy is in taking a world in which something is different from are own - be it the existence of magic or faster than light travel or something else - and imagining what living in such a world would be like. A very handy umbrella term for this type of story is "speculative fiction".

The great schism in speculative fiction is in how "hard" or "soft" you want the story to be. Soft speculative fiction would be something like Star Trek - in one episode they use the transporters to beam a bomb into the enemy's ship but in the next episode they don't (if the writers notice the inconsistency, they might throw in some technobabble - "There's a stream of tachyon radiation locking down our transporters, Captain!" - to spackle over the plot hole). On the other hand, you have stories like Asimov's Nightfall, where Asimov actually did out the appropriate astronomical equations to create a world where night happens only once every 2049 years. Most fantasy falls on the soft side of things, though that's mostly a stylistic choice. Neither type of story is inherently "better", they're just different. Variety is the spice of life, after all, and it's nice to have choices.

And this is where Dungeons & Dragons come in.

D&D, as I hope you know, is a fantasy roleplaying game that has it's roots deeply embedded in wargaming. As a result, it falls very much on the "soft" side of things. Gygax and Arneson were long on exploration and challenges but short on explanations. Why is there a tribe of goblins living right next to a androsphinx lair? Because it's just a game and you shouldn't worry too much about it.

This brings us back to our friend the owlbear.

Do you know where owlbears come from? Wizards. That's been the explanation since the 1970s and hasn't changed since then.

Forget being able to shoot fireballs out of your hands or being able to summon monsters from another dimension, wizards in D&D are able to create new lifeforms. D&D is pretty soft so it pretty much ignores the implications of this. Which is probably a good thing, since something like this brought to it's ultimate conclusion would be world-changing.

Let's start with something simple, like solving world hunger in the game. All it would take is crossing over a herd animal - say a cow - with a creature that breeds faster and matures quicker - say a mouse. Sure, the meat might taste funny, but I'm sure that beef tastes funny to somebody who's never tasted it before. A small price to pay for ending world hunger.

Or maybe they're looking for some sort of protection. After all, D&D NPCs live in a world where rampaging hordes of sentient Always Chaotic Evil monsters burn down villages everyday. Wouldn't having a dogbear - a creature with the loyalty of a dog and the power of a bear - help out a lot?

One of the great advantages of these creatures over, say, a magic item is that the vast majority of the peasants in the D&D world are capable of raising animals. Bending the forces of nature to create an animal hybrid never seen before would take years - if not decades - of study, but once you get a pair of them they can be bred like anything else.

Now, sure, something like this wouldn't happen overnight. However, in the real world, mankind was able to make dogs out wolves and we didn't have the help of magic at all. The people in such a world has the means and motive to start creating weird animal hybrids.

"Aha!" I hear you say, "There's no rules for creating such animal hybrids. Comparable creatures - golems, et al - require high level casters to create and mountains of gold, all of which are in short supply." This is the route taken by many DMs who don't want to see their world awash in dogbears and cowmice, but I find the answer unsatisfying. And it's because of this:

This is a picture of ENIAC, the world's first electronic computer. It was built in 1946 and cost $6 million (inflation adjusted). It weighed 30 tons, took up over 1800 sq ft of space, and the first program run on it required over a million punch cards.

The laptop that I used to write this post is over 340,000,000 times faster and cost about 0.016% of the price. And it certainly doesn't weight 30 tons.

The world of D&D should see a huge growth in the simplification of creating animal hybrids and the like. (Sidebar: Magic items should also see the same sort of progress, but you can't breed magic items and you can breed mix-and-match critters, which would make the critters even cheaper and more accessible.) If it takes a number of expensive components to create the animal hybrids, than people would find ways of either finding less expensive components or of finding ways to get components cheaper. If it takes high-level casters to do it, than people would find ways of easing the burden, perhaps through the use of rituals instead of a single caster or of simplifying the forces involved even if that reduces the effect ("Sure, we can't make an owlbear. But we can create a hybrid of these two breeds of sheep in a week instead of ten generations").

Now, what are some reasons to explain why all this isn't happening?

1. Knowledge is power and nobody likes to share power willingly. Perhaps all of the high-level casters are grumpy misanthropes who don't want to share the secrets of magical animal hybridization. Or perhaps they're all off busy saving the world or exploring the elemental planes or whatever else it is that keeps high-level casters busy.

This solution works ... for a while. However, all it takes is one high-level caster who's willing to start creating helpful hybrids. To prevent that from happening, you can't have the other high-level casters just sit passively by, they would have to be actively killing/mind controlling anybody who wants to start mix-and-matching. And it can't just be one caster doing this policing, it has to be a bunch of them, so you have a conspiracy of wizards and sorcerers actively hunting down anybody trying to create even something as innocuous as a duckbunny.

2. Too unpredictable Maybe when you mix and owl and a bear it doesn't always come out the same. Sometimes it's a bear with owl arms and head, sometimes it's an owl with a bear head, maybe sometimes it's a bear with two owl heads.

However, this only slows down the creation of useful hybrids, but it doesn't stop it entirely. Once you have a pair of them, you can just breed them like normal (owlbears, for instance, are apparently true breeding in the default D&D campaign world).

Of course, this means that anybody persistent enough to keep breeding monsters is going to create a bucketload of failed experiments. Most of them are going to either be destroyed by the creator or not last very long (a catfish that doesn't have legs but does have lungs, for instance) or both, but a small number would still escape every so often.

3. Too creepy Let's say a wizard creates a trollcow. It regenerates, so you can get as many hamburgers as you want from a single cow. However, it's an ugly, green and warty cow. How many people would want to eat from such a thing?

Sorry, that sounded like a rhetorical question. The answer is that eventually pretty much everybody would eat trollcowburgers. All it takes is one famine and people would start eating anything. If your choices come down to dying or using something creepy, most people would take the creepy option.

Like number 2 above, this would slow down the creation of monsters, but it wouldn't stop it completely. And, of course, once the majority of your products start coming from "creepy" creatures, what's considered "creepy" changes entirely.

Up to this point, I've confined the speculation to hybridization of animals with other animals (and trolls, I guess). However, this overlooks two big things. First, is the hybridization of hybrids with other hybrids. An owlbear needs to fight, flee, feed, and ... mate like every other animal. It breeds true, as well. By every measure, it is a mundane animal after being created. So why can't it be mixed with other creatures?

The other thing that's being overlooked it the hybridization of man and an animal. Of course, forcing a hybridization would be an evil act, however, that doesn't mean that the evil kingdoms are going to be the only group with dogsoldiers (or bearsoldiers or what have you). Soldiers are prepared to give their lives for their country, so why wouldn't a significant portion of them be willing to undergo magical experimentation to become even better soldiers? If a good kingdom is faced with asking it's soldiers to become hybrids or be destroyed, it's going to start asking around for volunteers.

Even if a kingdom is completely opposed to using such magical experimentation and would never do it no matter what, that doesn't mean that they wouldn't have hybrid soldiers. After all, when the good kingdom annexes the evil kingdom, the good kingdom certainly isn't going to commit genocide on the dogsoldiers. All those hybrids breed true and they're going to have litters of dogpeople. One way or another, every kingdom is going to end up with hybrid people unless they specifically go out of there way not to ("We must maintain human purity at any cost!").

It doesn't end at creating the perfect killing machine, of course. Why not start creating hybrids that excel at farming or crafting ... or magic? At that point, you start getting a positive feedback loop. You can create better hybrids that are able to create even better hybrids.

Way at the beginning, I said that speculative fiction is all about imaging what would happen in a world that was different from ours. What would happen in a feudal society which felt that nobility had divine blood running through their veins discovering the means of magical animal hybridization? Would the aristocracy forcibly mutate their serfs? The nobles already view them as chattel, so it wouldn't be a great leap. How would medieval laws define "person" as it refers to a population that is increasingly non-human? Truthfully, I don't know, but I'm having fun trying to reason it out.

Anyways, that's what I've been thinking about recently. Thoughts?

EDIT: Oh, also, if somebody could explain why there aren't Pun-Puns running around in D&D, that would be great.

[Gavinfoxx]

If solving world hunger were a problem of producing enough food for given resources, it would be done by now.

Really.

You know there are foods that, for a very very very small amount of energy investment, produce plants and proteins sufficient to feed everyone. We just have to switch from producing things like cows to producing things that produce high quantities of protein per acre of plant invested...

That doesn't happen because people like and can pay for their luxuries. But the main problem with your idea of just getting weird animals is that, such a thing probably won't really solve food problems that are based on entirely different factors than how much a society can farm.

[OracleofWuffing]

This solution works ... for a while. However, all it takes is one high-level caster who's willing to start creating helpful hybrids. To prevent that from happening, you can't have the other high-level casters just sit passively by, they would have to be actively killing/mind controlling anybody who wants to start mix-and-matching. And it can't just be one caster doing this policing, it has to be a bunch of them, so you have a conspiracy of wizards and sorcerers actively hunting down anybody trying to create even something as innocuous as a duckbunny.

For what it's worth, I remember a D&D 3.5 Tippyverse-based fan setting where this secret police of high-level Wizards (if I recall correctly, being a Sorcerer was like being a court jester or a mime- and not the good kind- due to your inferior magic) was actually a thing, doing mind-control shenanigans and instant deaths to guarantee that people wouldn't try to upset or usurp the balance of the god-wizard. That said, that's in a world where food and water is created from scratch on demand, so the incentives to hybrid creatures are much lower.

What would happen in a feudal society which felt that nobility had divine blood running through their veins discovering the means of magical animal hybridization? Would the aristocracy forcibly mutate their serfs?

Well, okay, I'll admit this is a stretch, but seeing as how history tells us European Royalty continued spreading and carrying Haemophilia for itself (granted, this was more of an unwilling accident), I might be inclined to say that they'd hybrid with little regard for taboo- regardless of caste. Eugenics themselves go back as far as Plato, apparently, and I think we've all seen the relevant scenes in 300 for an overmelodramatized take from Ancient Hollywood Sparta's point of view. Only difference between those and this is that this is happening magically, and I guess animals being involved might be important at some point. But, considering how half-human-half-animal deities and deity-like-figures appear in various religions, it just takes a good politician to spin that around to say that such figures are blessed by $deity.

[Chilingsworth]

In Sandstorm, there's information on the remaining breeding experiments of a race called the Marru. They probably did what you're suggesting, until they tried breeding a raceof demigods. They succeeded, but their creations destroyed them. Maybe that has something to do with industrial crossbreeding isn't more common?

Also, Eberon has the magebred animal template, in that setting, such creatures are fairly common. And in one of the Monster Manuals, there's the... battle titian (I think that's the name) dinosaur, a giant crossbred monstorsity of a warmount specially bred by major nations. There are other examples of crossbreeding projects in various sourcebooks. I'd say that there's definately evidence of what you're suggesting having happened to some extent.

[TooManySecrets]

If solving world hunger were a problem of producing enough food for given resources, it would be done by now.

Really.

You know there are foods that, for a very very very small amount of energy investment, produce plants and proteins sufficient to feed everyone. We just have to switch from producing things like cows to producing things that produce high quantities of protein per acre of plant invested...

You know what would be better than cows or rice? How about continually regenerating meat? Heck, Order of the Stick had this as part of a joke a while back.

Trollcows, hydrapigs, the sky's the limit. Now, this obviously violates thermodynamics, so how does regeneration even work? Well, we could just say "magic" and be done with it.

But once again that's an unsatisfying answer. Regeneration is an extraordinary ability so it continues to work in an antimagic field and it can't be dispelled. For that matter, though, undead and golems are explicatively magical but still operate fine in antimagic fields (though losing any supernatural or spell-like abilities as normal). Perhaps all of the above act like magical sinks? Undead are sinks of negative energy, golems are sinks of elemental energy, and regenerating creatures are sinks of positive energy.

Of course, all of the above still work when they have dimensional anchor cast of them, which we can either ignore or do something fiddly with the concept of a sink or say that wizards are somehow able to create non-magical sources of everlasting power. To say that the third option opens up a redonkulous can of worms (even more than magical animal hybrids) is putting it lightly. I don't want to just ignore things, so let's go with the fiddly option. The above creatures are essentially non-magical sinks for certain types of energy. They can still work with a dimensional anchor because they're the target of the energy, rather than moving through dimensions themselves.

They could probably work.

Well, okay, I'll admit this is a stretch, but seeing as how history tells us European Royalty continued spreading and carrying Haemophilia for itself (granted, this was more of an unwilling accident), I might be inclined to say that they'd hybrid with little regard for taboo- regardless of caste.

I personally think the aristocracy would try to keep themselves outwardly human or at least different. It would be a sign of having to work for a living to have a "degenerate" form. ("Oh, I see that you're bred for field work. And yet you still think you're good enough to come to my party. How droll.")

Plus, the haemophilia (and other hereditary diseases) were usually seen as a curse. For instance, Charles II of Spain was so inbred that he would have been less inbred if he was the product of a brother-sister breeding. He was born with numerous mental and physical disabilities which were thought to be the result of a witch, which is why he was also known as Charles the Hexed.

That being said, I'm thinking about making a campaign world, not a single country. There's no reason I can't do all of the above.

But, considering how half-human-half-animal deities and deity-like-figures appear in various religions, it just takes a good politician to spin that around to say that such figures are blessed by $deity.

Hmmm, I like this since it appeals to my love of Lovecraftian horror with dark cults. Good-aligned groups would be open about it, but evil ones would convince people with half-truths and lies. ("The process is entirely reversible. If you don't like it, we can change you back. But I know you'll love it") This isn't even mentioning cult-like groups springing up who worship mutation itself.

Speaking of which, I just realized something: the yuan-ti are already doing something like this. Except, you know, only focused on snakes. That's probably why they don't have a bigger presence. ("Yesssss, everybody lovesssss sssssnakessssss. We'll be the mossssst popular group ever!")

EDIT:

In Sandstorm, there's information on the remaining breeding experiments of a race called the Marru. They probably did what you're suggesting, until they tried breeding a raceof demigods. They succeeded, but their creations destroyed them. Maybe that has something to do with industrial crossbreeding isn't more common?

That's sort of like the same answer given to why we haven't made contact with aliens: every civilization destroys itself before it can talk to anybody else.

Anyways, that doesn't really solve the problem. After all, the race of demigods would presumably survive and keep working. A civilization would have to create a race that destroys them, but also destroys itself or is otherwise incapable of continuing experimentation. A green goo scenario, for instance.

Also, Eberon has the magebred animal template, in that setting, such creatures are fairly common. And in one of the Monster Manuals, there's the... battle titian (I think that's the name) dinosaur, a giant crossbred monstorsity of a warmount specially bred by major nations. There are other examples of crossbreeding projects in various sourcebooks. I'd say that there's definately evidence of what you're suggesting having happened to some extent.

Well, as I said, mankind turned wolves into dogs. The main difference is (a) control of traits and (b) speed.

Let's go back to ENIAC. Is there anything that ENIAC (or my laptop) can do that a person can't do? No. A person could do, by hand, absolutely everything that is done on a computer. However, this would be extremely slow (to say the least).

It takes thousands of years to breed new traits. It took about 10,000 years to domesticate dogs (the numbers vary widely, since finding specifics of that type of information is very hard). Being able to create a dog-cat hybrid in a lifetime, even if it takes decades, is a huge leap in breeding technology by several orders of magnitude.

[Makiru]

I remember reading the Encyclopedia Arcane that had to do with cross-breeding, and it was incredibly meticulous. The Spellcraft check for the ritual goes up by leaps and bounds depending on the types of the creatures to be combined, how many are to be combined at once (in the case of chimeras and other such monstrosities), how many abilities of each creature you want to carry over, if you're attempting to crossbreed with yourself as a component, and so forth. A frog with a snake tail, which is supposed to be babby's first freak of nature, had a check at least in the 30s. I believe it was implied that this method was also the best that Vancian magic would be able to do, that the fundamental process of wielding magic would have to be changed to get better results.

Long story short: even breeding simple things is hard and takes practice and would probably exist as a one-off event. Breeding on the level of the owlbear and chuul would take large groups of epic level mages that have better things to do with their time than mucking with animals, like stopping the next Pun-pun.

[Arbane]

Why not start creating hybrids that excel at farming or crafting ... or magic?

I'd argue they could exist in standard D&D: they're called "Halflings", "Dwarves", and "Elves".

[TooManySecrets]

Long story short: even breeding simple things is hard and takes practice and would probably exist as a one-off event. Breeding on the level of the owlbear and chuul would take large groups of epic level mages that have better things to do with their time than mucking with animals, like stopping the next Pun-pun.

Huh, I'll have to check out Encyclopedia Arcane. Sounds interesting.

Anyways, it took 3 years to build ENIAC during the height of World War II and took the combined engineering and science of the Moore School of Electrical Engineering, the US Army, and Los Alamos. The only people who could afford computers and had a use for them were governments and some universities which did work for governments. The phone in your pocket is far faster than ENIAC (around the 100 million range, depending on what it is).

Automobiles used to be made by hand by a team craftsmen, took months to complete, and only the richest people could afford even one. Today, it takes about 18 hours to build a car from the time the order is first placed. Almost every family owns a car.

The history of humanity is of making complicated, expensive things simple and cheap.

Now, I guess, you could just claim that magical animal hybridization falls under the same category as the aeolipile, the world's first steam engine. It never amounted to anything. It's inventor either never saw a use for it or, perhaps worse, realized the potential but didn't see a use for it in a world where slave labor was cheap and plentiful.

Animal husbandry, however, has a long and fruitful history. If somebody discovered a means of making it better, they would do so. The fact that it would be difficult is rather inconsequential - we're humans; we climb mountains because they're there. I could see somebody who lives in a world where they've never heard of "gears" not figuring out a use for the first steam engine. It's harder to imagine the same for somebody who grew up in a world where animal breeding is a big thing.

Basically, when you get down to it, the DCs are set arbitrarily to control what sort of game the DM wants. If they want D&D biopunk, then the DCs are in the teens. If they don't, then the DCs go to the 30s and 40s.

EDIT: Wait, does Encyclopedia Arcane assume that you get skill booster items? 'Cause if it doesn't, that means that it expects you to be around 8th or so to reliably hit a DC 30. That means that it is equally as easy to give a frog a snake's tail as it is to stitch together the limbs and body parts of six different dead people and then bring it back to a semblance of life except immune to most magic and under your command.

That ... seems off.

[OracleofWuffing]

I personally think the aristocracy would try to keep themselves outwardly human or at least different. It would be a sign of having to work for a living to have a "degenerate" form.

Well, I suppose it is all about context. In a world that would value pureblooded-humanity (for whatever that would be in a high-fantasy world ), calling Richard I "Lion-hearted" would be an insult, wouldn't it? Regardless, it'd also be worthwhile to check out idioms and similes which compare something to animals... "Strong as a bull moose" comes to mind.

Note to self: Stat up Richard I as a half-lion dragon.

[TooManySecrets]

Well, I suppose it is all about context. In a world that would value pureblooded-humanity (for whatever that would be in a high-fantasy world ), calling Richard I "Lion-hearted" would be an insult, wouldn't it? Regardless, it'd also be worthwhile to check out idioms and similes which compare something to animals... "Strong as a bull moose" comes to mind.

Note to self: Stat up Richard I as a half-lion dragon.

Most of those idioms either originated in or were used as evidence for physiognomy.



Physiognomy started out as a pretend science around the 14th century. I won't get into the details, but it was basically used as an excuse to denigrate ugly people and racial minorities. You might think that there was something to it beyond just stuff like "You look like a pig. You must be sloppy and brutish". You would be wrong however.

Anyways, I think the aristocracy would basically schism in two directions. One, would be the group that sees any sort of non-human hybridization as "low brow". Serfs get changed because they do work. Aristocrats are above such things, thus they don't need to get hybridized. This is the same reason it used to be fashionable to be fat - if you were fat, it meant that you could afford to eat well and you didn't do work.

The other group would basically revel in being the top dog, as it were. This group would be obsessed at being the best at everything - the fastest, the strongest, the toughest. You'd get a lot of predator-metaphors. You'd probably also get rumors that some aristocrats ate people. Some of the rumors might actually be true.

Both group would probably have their own version of physiognomy. ("Ugh, look at him. That drooping ears, the downturned nose, the growing bald spot. It's obvious that he has a pig in his line.")

Another problem previously unmentioned is of finding jobs for everybody. There's only so much farm work that can be done, and if the serfs are all becoming individually more effective, you reach a point when serfs start leaving to go to the city (which can now exist since there is excess food to spare). In real life, this lead to the growth of the middle class and increased civil liberties. Of course, it doesn't have to go this way in this world (and given that, in the real world, part of the reason that the aristocrats eventually accepted the middle class was because the Black Death killed tons of people and made the remaining workers more valuable there's reason to suspect that it wouldn't go that way).

[Arminius]

I am not so sure this would be useful as a food source. Wouldn't banks of create food traps be more effective, especially for places like cities?

The real promise here is that we could create a slave race that would be able to replace peasants as the main labour force and source of soldiers. The main problem is, giving such a race the intelligence required for them to be useful is also dangerous. Once they realise they exist only to work while their masters play, that might lead to an uprising, by superstrong and resilient mutants. Letting them reproduce freely may simplify their production, but it also means that if they do ever break away, they may become a long term threat to their creator's civilization. A more secure, but also more labour intensive route would be to make them sterile and figure out how to mass produce them. Some kind of mindrape would also be good to ensure loyalty. It would also be possible to introduce an additional safeguard, like the Jem'Hadar's need for ketracel white into them, so that any rebellion would die quickly.

This does give rise to the question of what to do with the peasants. They could simply be abandoned to their villages, but this also might mean they would become a threat to the civilization because they will want in on it's benefits. A more evil option is to exterminate the peasants, leaving only the ruling class. They peasants could also be integrated into the civilization, but this will require educating them, which will create it's own problems. The good news is, however you do it, the remaining humans will have a good shot at a post scarcity society.

The ruling class will probably focus on mental improvements for themselves(though the furries would probably do a bit more extensive tinkering). Their power as wizards is based on their intelligence, so that is an obvious thing to improve. Even in a military or engineering capacity, they will be leaders not soldiers/labourers They do not need to be particularly strong, but they do need to be intelligent, so they can effectively command their mutant armies. Mental attributes in general will probably be emphasized, since the physical ones are no longer really needed except by the slaves.

It is also good to know, that while this plan would require cat-girls to possibly go extinct, it would also give us the means to re-create them.

[supermonkeyjoe]

Interesting discussion but consider this; where in any D&D sourcebook does it say that famine is ever a problem in a setting? I certainly can't recall it being a problem in the Eberron setting except in Karrnath during the war (at which point it would be prudent to burn all your enemies trollcows). It seems that everyone automatically assigns a medieval English level of advancement to the setting and come up with the same level of destitution that goes with it for the peasant class, it's perfectly reasonable for them to still be poor in a world with magical hybrid creatures but they don't necessarily have to be hungry.

[TooManySecrets]

Interesting discussion but consider this; where in any D&D sourcebook does it say that famine is ever a problem in a setting? I certainly can't recall it being a problem in the Eberron setting except in Karrnath during the war (at which point it would be prudent to burn all your enemies trollcows). It seems that everyone automatically assigns a medieval English level of advancement to the setting and come up with the same level of destitution that goes with it for the peasant class, it's perfectly reasonable for them to still be poor in a world with magical hybrid creatures but they don't necessarily have to be hungry.

Part of the problem is that D&D just doesn't exist in any real historical setting. For instance, from what I've read, in the Middle Ages, it took about 10 farmers to provide enough food for 1 urban dweller. You have stuff from the 14th and 15th century butting heads with stuff from the 8th century. It's high fantasy, probably the softest fantasy around.

Which, once again, isn't a bad thing in itself. There are very few people who want to run actuarial tables to determine the age and gender composition of Adventure Town #3,091 in order to run a strictly realistic game. It does mean, however, that it completely glosses over the famines, plagues, floods, and fires that completely shaped society at the time (plus dozens of other things that I haven't mentioned).

I am not so sure this would be useful as a food source. Wouldn't banks of create food traps be more effective, especially for places like cities?

Truthfully, (a) I chose D&D as the default area of discussion because it's what most people are familiar with and (b) it has a relatively consistent setting that goes across editions. Create Food and Water traps, for instance, are a quirk of 3.5. They don't exist in official publications and a GM could say "None of this now. It just doesn't work." and it wouldn't be contradicted in any edition.

However, if a GM were to say "Owlbears can't be created by magic." that's well within his or her prerogative to do so but owlbears being the product of magical experimentation has been consistent across over almost every edition (though, it should be noted, I haven't found any specifics of the process).

Now, if it makes it easier, I could have just as easily said "What would happen to a medieval society that discovered a means of mix-and-match critters similar to how owlbears were created in Dungeons & Dragons?". That's probably the better way of stating it, since it doesn't carry the rest of the baggage of D&D e.g. "Why would anybody bother making magical animal hybrids when all the kobolds are turning into Pun-Pun?".

The real promise here is that we could create a slave race that would be able to replace peasants as the main labour force and source of soldiers. The main problem is, giving such a race the intelligence required for them to be useful is also dangerous. Once they realise they exist only to work while their masters play, that might lead to an uprising, by superstrong and resilient mutants. Letting them reproduce freely may simplify their production, but it also means that if they do ever break away, they may become a long term threat to their creator's civilization. [...] Some kind of mindrape would also be good to ensure loyalty.

The neogi actually do something like this already. They created the umber hulks to be a slave race, specifically bodyguards. While umber hulks do get free every so often, they're very weak against the form of mind control used by the neogi.

Part of the solution to preventing a slave uprising is making it part of the culture. The neogi, for instance, believe that everybody is owned by somebody else (except possibly for a single neogi). Neogi own other neogi who, in turn, own other slaves. Sometimes you even get circles of ownership where A owns B owns C owns A. None of the neogi want to rock the boat, even though each one is a slave, because they all own their own slaves.

Also, as a sidenote, I think you're missing a most-interesting issue with developing slave races - what happens when the group that created the slave race is conquered? Going back to the good kingdom annexing the evil kingdom with hybrid soldiers, the good kingdom is now faced with the issue of letting the hybrids work for them (thereby profiting from evil) or killing them off (which is obviously evil). The good group can't even just ask the former-slave race what it wants to do if it's been mind controlled to be subservient - they're obviously going to answer that they want to be ruled.

A more secure, but also more labour intensive route would be to make them sterile and figure out how to mass produce them.

Making them sterile ignores the whole point of making them organic, though. Perhaps such a group would try to hybridize in ant-style growth, with a few fertile males and females and a bunch of sterile workers.

It would also be possible to introduce an additional safeguard, like the Jem'Hadar's need for ketracel white into them, so that any rebellion would die quickly.

Who, exactly, is going to get the specific chemical, though? You can't let the created slave race get it, so you have to use your own people to do it. Anybody who gets the chemical would have to be trusted completely because they effectively have control of your race of super-strong, resilient mutants.

This does give rise to the question of what to do with the peasants. They could simply be abandoned to their villages, but this also might mean they would become a threat to the civilization because they will want in on it's benefits. A more evil option is to exterminate the peasants, leaving only the ruling class. They peasants could also be integrated into the civilization, but this will require educating them, which will create it's own problems. The good news is, however you do it, the remaining humans will have a good shot at a post scarcity society.

That's a modern view of looking at it. In the real world, the aristocrats pretty much saw the serfs as sub-humans already. There were numerous peasants revolts throughout history, all of which were put down violently and with very little concessions being made. In areas where aristocrats had less power, the people who had power were the plutocrats - rich merchants, mostly. They're certainly not going to want to hob-nob with dirty peasants.

Basically, it depends on where the discovery is made. If it's before the 14th or 15th-century equivalent, there are going to be lots and lots of problems.


Sidenote: I think that Spacejammer had as part of it's backstory a bio-war between elves and orcs. I seem to remember something called Midnight Marauders.

[nedz]

Owlbears: I thought they just applied the Half-Owl template to a Bear, or was it the Half-Bear template to an Owl ?

Slighty more seriously: I always thought that the explaination was "Magic we just don't talk about".

[Beleriphon]

It takes thousands of years to breed new traits. It took about 10,000 years to domesticate dogs (the numbers vary widely, since finding specifics of that type of information is very hard). Being able to create a dog-cat hybrid in a lifetime, even if it takes decades, is a huge leap in breeding technology by several orders of magnitude.

Perhaps, but new research from Russia suggests that domestication only takes around 50 generations of the target species. In the specific study using foxes we're talking about 25 to 30 years. With some dedication early human likely domesticated wolves inside of two human life times.

Breeding animals for specific traits actually doesn't take that long, if you know what you are doing. There are number of dog breeds that have only existed for around 100 years, admittably they aren't exactly going from chihuahuas to great danes but the point still stands that it doesn't take a super long time.

Getting a viable cross species breeding program is more difficult. Rather than cats and dogs living together (being the end of the world and all) you'd be better to go with something like house cats and lions. Then at least the new animal realisticall should be able to kill a bog standard commoner, or 1st level wizard.

[Gavinfoxx]

God, I want one of those pet domesticated foxes...

http://www.sibfox.com/

[TooManySecrets]

Slighty more seriously: I always thought that the explaination was "Magic we just don't talk about".

Well, actually, the real reason is "If we say how the wizards did it, we'll have to write up additional rules for it, and we don't want players creating a bunch of monsters for giggles". It's sort of the same reason golems and undead show up absolutely everywhere in dungeon crawls even though they're usually so expensive that no player would ever actually make one.

Getting a viable cross species breeding program is more difficult. Rather than cats and dogs living together (being the end of the world and all) you'd be better to go with something like house cats and lions. Then at least the new animal realisticall should be able to kill a bog standard commoner, or 1st level wizard.

Well, house cats can already kill commoners and wizards-without-spells. (Ah, the joys of most playtesting being at 5th level)

I guess what I'm trying to say is that magical animal hybridization allows for dramatic changes quickly. Taking an animal that is already a great hunter in the wild and breeding in traits that would allow it to hunt, say, puffins underwater isn't a huge, dramatic change. Making it breathe fire is.

[TheCountAlucard]

It's sort of the same reason golems and undead show up absolutely everywhere in dungeon crawls even though they're usually so expensive that no player would ever actually make one.

Ye gods the Dread Guard! Hailing from Monster Manual 2, the Dread Guard is CR 2, has an attack bonus appropriate to such, and (despite the fact that its Intelligence score is better than that of some PCs I've seen) is only intelligent enough to understand the simplest of commands. Its cost? Forty thousand gold pieces, not counting the base price of the armor, weapon, and shield you need to provide.

At least golems are immune to most spells and have an energy type that heals them... hell, I'd rather go with a Shield Guardian - I could make two of them, for that price.

(Of course, we all know the Nimblewright is the pimp-daddy of constructs. )

[The Succubus]

Let's start with something simple, like solving world hunger in the game. All it would take is crossing over a herd animal - say a cow - with a creature that breeds faster and matures quicker - say a mouse. Sure, the meat might taste funny, but I'm sure that beef tastes funny to somebody who's never tasted it before. A small price to pay for ending world hunger.

Not really beneficial as you'd have a creature that would devour the cheese it produces.

[jseah]

Psychological engineering?
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=219642

Magical breeding ought to do it a whole lot faster.

[The Reverend]

The problem of minions of some type is a constent issue in games. For example in a warhammer fantasy role playing game I played a halfling circus performer and had a pack of five large dogs. I trained them to attack as a group and rolled thru the first few encounters our dm had setup. I think the idea of mass magical crossbreeds would fit into a game of BirthRight very well. I did play a campaign in 3.5 where every character had their own horde of minions. Basically what I'm saying is you are right in every point, but unless a group decides on how it should work I would stay away from it.


Famines historically and in modern times only occur when two factors coincide: crop failure and mass governmental stupidity or a active malice

Edit thpp

The house cat commoner problem leads to some interesting ideas
Summon swarm of house cats
Cat a pult

[Kalirren]

TooManySecrets, I must recommend the Geneforge series of cRPGs by Spiderweb Software to you. Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb's lead designer) does an excellent job of exploring the implications of exactly the type of magical society you are contemplating.

[Saph]

Well, a possible answer as to why you don't have vast numbers of cross-bred hybrids might be found in the basic game mechanics. In the long run, what tends to make a more effective character?

1) A monster class with a bunch of RHD and a lot of LA?
2) A "powerful" humanoid race with no RHD but a few points of LA?
3) A basic PHB humanoid?

The answer is 3. And the best PHB race is generally considered to be . . . the basic human, even though they have no obviously funky racial features like ability boosts or heightened senses.

So the D&D wizards who create hybrids are the equivalent of the wannabe power-gamer player who builds a Half-Dragon Centaur Fighter/Wizard/Dragon Shaman/Rogue with whatever other templates he can convince the DM to give him. Sure, it looks scary to a new DM . . . but an experienced DM knows that the guy sitting at the table next to him with a simple Human Druid is going to be more effective in the long run.

Or you could look at real-life biology. Why don't humans have six arms, enhanced muscles, super-longevity, retractable claws, chameleon skin, and the ability to spit poison?

Answer: because in general, it's not worth it.

[Zombimode]

Now, what are some reasons to explain why all this isn't happening?

It seems to me that the centerpiece of your reasoning is the assumption that magic is based on the same premises as technology and adheres to the same mechanisms. While that is a fair interpretation, it is not a neccesary one and is certainly not widespread throughout fairy tales and mythology where the notion of "magic" is coined.

It would be equaly viable to say that magic and technology are different.

Answer: because in general, it's not worth it.

That, too.

I would say you can create a believeable fantasy world where you have cowmice and stuff. But you also can create a believeable fantasy world that has olwbears but no owlbeardogs. It all depends on the initial premises. And the ability to define those premises is what seperates fiction from non-fiction

[Another_Poet]

TooManySecrets, all I can say is I wish I could click "like" on your post.

It should be reprinted in the worldbuilding section of every GM manual for every fantasy RPG out there.

[TooManySecrets]

Ye gods the Dread Guard! [...]

(Of course, we all know the Nimblewright is the pimp-daddy of constructs. )

Yeah, the Dread Guard is terrible and the Nimblewright is great. Another really good golem is the Prismatic Golem. It's from MMIII. It's CR 18 and can be made at caster level 17. Incorporeal, 2 touch attacks that deal 5d6 damage of random type (or insanity or 10d6 damage, but the last two allow saves), auto-blinds creatures of 8HD or less, damages any creature that touches it, is immune to all magic (except for prismatic spells, in which case it gets healed and ends the effect, including prismatic walls), and has a bunch of other minor bonuses. The Juggernaut from MMII is also really good, but that's mostly because it can cast forecage
- one of the more broken spells around - at will.

In short, there are some good golems around, but the vast majority are overpriced and underpowered.

Not really beneficial as you'd have a creature that would devour the cheese it produces.

Psychological engineering?
http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?t=219642

Magical breeding ought to do it a whole lot faster.

Speaking of looking at stuff that people on the forums have done, any campaign and/or system I would run based on this concept would also draw a lot from Kellus's excellent xenoalchemy grafts.

The problem of minions of some type is a constent issue in games. For example in a warhammer fantasy role playing game I played a halfling circus performer and had a pack of five large dogs. I trained them to attack as a group and rolled thru the first few encounters our dm had setup. I think the idea of mass magical crossbreeds would fit into a game of BirthRight very well. I did play a campaign in 3.5 where every character had their own horde of minions. Basically what I'm saying is you are right in every point, but unless a group decides on how it should work I would stay away from it.

Of course, whatever I decide upon has to be right for the group I'm playing with or running a game for. That pretty much goes without saying. Sometimes, rules and common sense need to be bent in favor of playing a game that's actually enjoyable.

I haven't given much thought to running battles where players potentially have a lot of minions. In one game, a player ran an artificer which we nicknamed the Lagificer because he had like 5 golems. Since I didn't run many encounters in that game and it was face to face, it went pretty quickly anyways and didn't really matter.

Realistically, I'm not really worried about it right now. This is just the high-level stuff. It's not time for the nitty-gritty of designing a system or changing an existing system.

TooManySecrets, I must recommend the Geneforge series of cRPGs by Spiderweb Software to you. Jeff Vogel (Spiderweb's lead designer) does an excellent job of exploring the implications of exactly the type of magical society you are contemplating.

I liked Exile and Avernum, but I never got around to playing Geneforge. I'll see if I can do it someday.

Well, a possible answer as to why you don't have vast numbers of cross-bred hybrids might be found in the basic game mechanics. In the long run, what tends to make a more effective character?

1) A monster class with a bunch of RHD and a lot of LA?
2) A "powerful" humanoid race with no RHD but a few points of LA?
3) A basic PHB humanoid?

The answer is 3. And the best PHB race is generally considered to be . . . the basic human, even though they have no obviously funky racial features like ability boosts or heightened senses.

Yeah, but see here - there's a difference between game mechanics and game story. Once again, why isn't the multiverse being run by Pun-Pun? After all, the mechanics allow it. (Incidentally, kobolds aren't basic PHB humanoids)

Here's the thing: I have consistently, in this thread, not cared about exact edition. Specific rules are pretty much inconsequential. That's part of the reason why I've chose the owlbear - it's fluff has remained consistent as far back as 1st edition.

"The horrible owlbear is probably the result of genetic experimentation by some insane wizard."

What I'm considering here is creating a consistent and compelling chronicle of a creation that is completely fictional. Rules come and go, but fluff is eternal (at least if it's interesting). Besides, if I'm going to GM a game, the rules are at my mercy, not the other way around.


[EDIT] Not to mention the fact that in your example this is assuming that all the numbers on each side. One monsters vs. one monster w/classes vs. one humanoid w/classes. However, that's not always going to be the case. If I create a fast-breeding race of monsters, the fact that each monster is only CR 3 isn't going to really matter if I have two-thousand of them and more being born every day.

This is also ignoring the fact that, from the perspective of a magical hybrid breeder, it's not a case of either-or, where you can either grow a servitor race or you can be a high-level wizard. In fact, the assumption had always been that the initial breeder was a high-level wizard. In a battle between a CL 16 wizard vs. a CL 15 wizard with two-thousand regenerating flying dogs, I'd go with the CL 15 wizard.[/EDIT]

Or you could look at real-life biology. Why don't humans have six arms, enhanced muscles, super-longevity, retractable claws, chameleon skin, and the ability to spit poison?

Answer: because in general, it's not worth it.

Well, actually, that's not a complete answer. Natural selection is a "dumb" process. It has no means of prognosticating about the future because it doesn't have any intelligence behind it. Human beings are constantly choking to death because our air passage is the same one that is used for food. Saying that it's "not worth it" implies that there was any choice in the matter, which there wasn't.

A better, more complete answer is because (a) evolution takes many generations (which translates into a long-time for pretty much any sapient species), (b) traits either have to be pre-existing or mutate into the population (both of which take a long time), and (c) natural selection is weighted to favor traits that use the minimum amount of energy required to insure reproduction.

Slight diversion: there is a physical mutation in some animals (and sometimes even humans) that prevents the production of myostatin (or prevents myostatin from binding). Animals with this mutation look like this:

In a very simplified version, myostatin is a chemical signal to your muscles that tell them when stop growing. This is a good thing in the wild. Wendy, the whippet here, experiences a host of heart and bone-related problems. Her muscles might be the Hulk's, but her heart and bones are still the same as every other whippet. In the wild, being able to benchpress an entire tree doesn't really mean much if your heart can't handle the strain, your bones break, and you need to eat four times as much as everybody else.

None of these are problems, however, in a servitor species.

If you're going to produce as many hybrid shock troops as possible, it doesn't matter if they're going to die of a heart attack at 30 if they're going to die in combat long before then anyways. In this case, natural selection is no longer what is driving the creation of the species, but guided selection. It's happening with whippets like Wendy right now. Dogs like her are able to easily reach speeds of 35 mphs and since the whippet dog breeders are interested in speed, there's getting to be more and more of these "bully whippets" (which, by the by, is named because of there similarity in shape to pit bulls, not because of temperament).

It seems to me that the centerpiece of your reasoning is the assumption that magic is based on the same premises as technology and adheres to the same mechanisms. While that is a fair interpretation, it is not a neccesary one and is certainly not widespread throughout fairy tales and mythology where the notion of "magic" is coined.

It would be equaly viable to say that magic and technology are different.

I'm going to have to disagree with you here. Magic is treated far more like a technology than randomness in D&D. Wizards have books of spell formulas and are able to research new spells. Eberron, for instance, fully embraced "magic as tech" paradigm, but even earlier editions had it to a smaller extent as well. Of course, sorcerers treat magic in a different way, but it's sufficient to show that it can be treated as a tech.

Now, yes, if I was a player and went to my DM going "Hey, why can't I start mass-producing owlbears and why hasn't anybody done it before?", the DM can say "Well, magic isn't the same as technology" and that would be fine ("You could, but it would be too disruptive to play, so please don't" would also be appropriate). However, I've been approaching this from the perspective of a GM who would run a game set in such a world or, at minimum, as a game designer who wants to create a campaign setting.

That, too.

I would say you can create a believeable fantasy world where you have cowmice and stuff. But you also can create a believeable fantasy world that has olwbears but no owlbeardogs. It all depends on the initial premises. And the ability to define those premises is what seperates fiction from non-fiction

Well, what technically separates fiction from non-fiction is that fiction isn't real.

Anyways, if you can have owlbears and owldogs and what have you, that would be self-consistent. If you can have owlbears but no owldogs due to a set of rules that are applied evenly, that would also be self-consistent. If you can have owlbears but no owldogs due to the fact that shut up, that's not self-consistent and breaks immersion (and usually leads to confused and angry players).

Now, definitely, you can have worlds that fall on the poetic-side of things. Fables and mythology are usually very low on explanations. Doing that however is hard. Very hard. Especially in a situation like a roleplaying game where players need to make choices. If I can't use rationality to reason out what's going to happen when I make a choice, it's probably going to leave me feeling very unsatisfied.

TooManySecrets, all I can say is I wish I could click "like" on your post.

It should be reprinted in the worldbuilding section of every GM manual for every fantasy RPG out there.

Thanks for the approval.

Worlds without a consistent set of rules (in the "physical laws" sense, not "game design" sense) is one of my big pet-peeves. Now, like pretty much everything, there are great examples where breaking the rules make it more fun - Paranoia is a great RPG because, not in spite, of it, for example - but this needs to be a conscious decision on the part of the game designer, not a convenient excuse trotted out whenever somebody starts poking holes in your setting. Saying stuff like ...

... should never be necessary. If you've created a consistent setting, you don't need to say it, and if you've created a setting that is purposefully inconsistent, the players should know that before they start playing. It's a cop-out.

[Saph]

Yeah, but see here - there's a difference between game mechanics and game story. Once again, why isn't the multiverse being run by Pun-Pun? After all, the mechanics allow it.

There are several interesting and quite consistent answers to that, actually. But it's off-topic.

Point is, you asked "Why isn't the D&D world filled with a bajillion specialised hybrids like owlbears?" And I gave you a logical answer that's supported by the game rules: in the long run, an adaptable generalist race is better.

Now you obviously don't like that answer, but it's a perfectly sensible one.

[TheCountAlucard]

Not really beneficial as you'd have a creature that would devour the cheese it produces.

Mice have general preferences for what they will eat.

Cheese is unbelievably-low on that list.

[nedz]

Slighty more seriously: I always thought that the explaination was "Magic we just don't talk about".

Well, actually, the real reason is "If we say how the wizards did it, we'll have to write up additional rules for it, and we don't want players creating a bunch of monsters for giggles". It's sort of the same reason golems and undead show up absolutely everywhere in dungeon crawls even though they're usually so expensive that no player would ever actually make one.

You're over-analysing. In those days people just made up monsters for the fun of it. Take a look at the 1E FF sometime, most of the monsters in that book came from a magasine column where people would send in their ideas. The're almost all homebrew. OwlBear is 1E MM of course, but someone at TSR just had a zany idea one day and the OwlBear was born. Monsters in those days where an exercise in creativity upon which the rules were loosely draped.

[Coidzor]

I've had a number of similar thoughts myself and consider the subject pretty fascinating.