Why Aren't There Half-Dwarves?

[Naanomi]

I don't think so; Bilbo has a mechanical clock, though, and lights his pipe with matches, which aren't mentioned in Lord of the Rings, to my knowledge. Gimli lights his fires with flint and tinder.

The dwarves also have clarinets (an 18th century instrument); and Gandfalf's fireworks passed 'like an express train'

[johnbragg]

Because Narnia is all Christian, and D&D, as we all know, is about converting the innocent youth to worship Satan. Narnia references would completely defeat the point!

/sarcasm

To be a little bit more serious, CS Lewis was generally less "metal" than Tolkien, never mind pulp sword-and-sorcery and science-fantasy. Your most gameable CS Lewis content isn't Narnia, it's turning the Screwtape Letters into game mechanics relevant to a subtle BBEG.

[LibraryOgre]

Because it would be quite hard to do.

I'm not so sure about it; I think you would have to design a few races differently, but the basic framework for the races with prominent subraces would support it.

So, imagine, that "Elf" had a "Half-human" subrace. It might give you a +1 to Charisma, and proficiency in two skills.

Dwarf might have half-gnome subrace; it increases your Intelligence by 1 and the ability to speak with burrowing mammals.

Design things a bit differently, and you might have Race (which determines some broad characteristics), Subrace (which might be a half-race), and Background. You might have a Human with the Half-Elf subrace, an Elf with the Half-Human subrace, and both of them might have the Entertainer background, leading to somewhat similar... but not identical... characters that can TOTALLY do a recreation of the Parent Trap.

I think Pathfinder 2e did something similar, but I am not sure; I haven't dived into it, since I don't want to.

[Amdy_vill]

half dwarves do make appearances in dnd medie, i even think 3.5 had stats for them, i know 3.5 had stats for dwelves(half elf half dwarf). I don 't really know why they never cough on as a core race.

[C-Dude]

Because it would be quite hard to do.

I found this when I was doing a random search for dragon hybrids (not investigation for this thread, but the result is relevant here).

https://stepintorpgs.wordpress.com/2...ns-dragons-5e/

Looks like somebody already looked into a hybridization template system; they broke the 5e race templates into left and right components and you have to pick one of each. The neat thing about the system this individual proposes is that if you pick the left and right of the same race, it ends up (almost) exactly as if you didn't apply a template at all.


--
Thanks to QuickLyRaiNbow for the info about Tolkien's hobbits, and thanks to Mark Hall for the info about AD&D's halflings. I think my impressions about halflings came from the latter (and my memory clipped away the elven roots stuff because Half Elves were already covered). I'll probably keep thinking of them as half dwarves (and keep depicting them as such in my games), but your information is very helpful context.

[Misterwhisper]

I would assume it is because ladies don’t tend to like short, hairy, stocky guys, and dwarf ladies are the wrong kind of stacked.

[LibraryOgre]

I would assume it is because ladies don’t tend to like short, hairy, stocky guys, and dwarf ladies are the wrong kind of stacked.

Dwarven women are beautiful lovers.

Spoiler: Dwarven women know just how to please a man

Show

Dwarven women, are beautiful lovers
Dwarven women, they understand
I've been around some, and I have discovered
That dwarven women know just how to please a man.
(Verse)
Everybody seems to love those human women
Buck eighteen on up to one twenty-five
Well I love 'em too, but I'm tellin' you
Dwarves know to really love, and boy it sure is fine
(CHORUS)
(Verse)
So baby don't you worry about growin' whiskers
Those elven girls ain't got nothin' on you
Cause it takes some whiskey, to get 'em frisky
And frisky dwarves may just be the ones to teach 'em a thing or two.
(Chorus)

[HappyDaze]

Dwarves don't reproduce sexually. New dwarves are carved from stone and then animated with a blessing from a priest of Moradin.

Exalted's Mountain Folk did this. Except they were life forces in the stone and then that stone was carved away to reveal them. Workers and Warriors were very dwarf-like, but Artisans were human-proportioned and pretty super-awesome in almost every way.

[Misterwhisper]

Dwarven women are beautiful lovers.

Spoiler: Dwarven women know just how to please a man

Show

Dwarven women, are beautiful lovers
Dwarven women, they understand
I've been around some, and I have discovered
That dwarven women know just how to please a man.
(Verse)
Everybody seems to love those human women
Buck eighteen on up to one twenty-five
Well I love 'em too, but I'm tellin' you
Dwarves know to really love, and boy it sure is fine
(CHORUS)
(Verse)
So baby don't you worry about growin' whiskers
Those elven girls ain't got nothin' on you
Cause it takes some whiskey, to get 'em frisky
And frisky dwarves may just be the ones to teach 'em a thing or two.
(Chorus)

Dangit, now I want to play a Hill-billy dwarf country music singer with a banjo...

[LibraryOgre]

Dangit, now I want to play a Hill-billy dwarf country music singer with a banjo...

I openly regret the lack of "gnome country" in popular music. You have metal inspired by fantasy, where's my country song about being an elf or a gnome?

[QuickLyRaiNbow]

I openly regret the lack of "gnome country" in popular music. You have metal inspired by fantasy, where's my country song about being an elf or a gnome?

I honestly think the answer is that the ones we might be familiar with were repurposed as work or rebel songs or given new lyrics. There are a few surviving examples, like "The Great Silkie of Sule Skerry" from Shetland or the various versions of "Lady Isabel and the Elf-Knight". There are also frequent appearances by mermaids in sea songs or working shanties. Generally though I'd say it's because country music comes from a place that doesn't have a tradition of elf or dwarf legends, and contemporary folk comes from the folk revival of the late 1950s, which in turn is influenced primarily by work songs, traditional and rebel songs from the Irish diaspora, and contemporary ballads like "The Town I Loved So Well". So what you'd be looking for is probably something in the Irish Country genre, with traditional folk songs recorded in a modern country style - for example, Nathan Carter's recording of "Banks of the Roses".

Of course, if you're fluent in Icelandic, you could listen to "Ólafur Liljurós", about a guy who gets murdered by elves for being a Christian.

[loki_ragnarock]

Dwarven women are beautiful lovers.

Spoiler: Dwarven women know just how to please a man

Show

Dwarven women, are beautiful lovers
Dwarven women, they understand
I've been around some, and I have discovered
That dwarven women know just how to please a man.
(Verse)
Everybody seems to love those human women
Buck eighteen on up to one twenty-five
Well I love 'em too, but I'm tellin' you
Dwarves know to really love, and boy it sure is fine
(CHORUS)
(Verse)
So baby don't you worry about growin' whiskers
Those elven girls ain't got nothin' on you
Cause it takes some whiskey, to get 'em frisky
And frisky dwarves may just be the ones to teach 'em a thing or two.
(Chorus)

I have never clicked a link on this forum with more trepidation.

[LibraryOgre]

I have never clicked a link on this forum with more trepidation.

That I placed fear in the heart of Loki does my viking heart good.

[greenstone]

I've always wondered why there are half-elves and half-orcs, but no half-dwarves.

In the cosmology of my game world, it is because of the gods.

The creator gods of the dwarf, gnome, goliath and halfling species take an active role in the development of their creations. Part of their influence is that those races don't interbreed with anything. The gods are, essentially, maintaining the "purity" or "integrity" of their creations (which of those words someone in the game uses will tell you a lot about their attitudes to diversity).

The gods of the elves don't take any responsibility, for anything. They don't spend any effort looking after the race (their time is spent partying and attempting, umm, "intimacy" with anything that moves). Even the creation of the elven race was an accident. Elven gods are the personification of the term "chaotic".

Humans have a problem in that their creator gods are missing (murdered many thousands of years ago). With no god maintining the species, all sorts of strange things have crept into the bloodline - genasi, tieflings, aasimar, half-elves, and half-orcs.

The orc race has something called the Blessing of Luthic. Orcs can interbreed with almost anything (which gets squicky very quickly). Orc-human and orc-elf pairings produce half-orcs (using the PHB statistics for both types of children).

Some human and elven societies have immense hatred for half-breeds; some don't. The childhood of a half-orc, half-elf or planetouched could range anywhere from "despised scum" all the way to "loved and cherished child" (so, to be fair, could the childhood of anyone in the world).

Aaracokra and dragonborn are biologically different, so interbreeding is impossible (dragonborn aren't even mammalian).

[Luccan]

In the cosmology of my game world, it is because of the gods.

The creator gods of the dwarf, gnome, goliath and halfling species take an active role in the development of their creations. Part of their influence is that those races don't interbreed with anything. The gods are, essentially, maintaining the "purity" or "integrity" of their creations (which of those words someone in the game uses will tell you a lot about their attitudes to diversity).

The gods of the elves don't take any responsibility, for anything. They don't spend any effort looking after the race (their time is spent partying and attempting, umm, "intimacy" with anything that moves). Even the creation of the elven race was an accident. Elven gods are the personification of the term "chaotic".

Humans have a problem in that their creator gods are missing (murdered many thousands of years ago). With no god maintining the species, all sorts of strange things have crept into the bloodline - genasi, tieflings, aasimar, half-elves, and half-orcs.

The orc race has something called the Blessing of Luthic. Orcs can interbreed with almost anything (which gets squicky very quickly). Orc-human and orc-elf pairings produce half-orcs (using the PHB statistics for both types of children).

Some human and elven societies have immense hatred for half-breeds; some don't. The childhood of a half-orc, half-elf or planetouched could range anywhere from "despised scum" all the way to "loved and cherished child" (so, to be fair, could the childhood of anyone in the world).

Aaracokra and dragonborn are biologically different, so interbreeding is impossible (dragonborn aren't even mammalian).

Hmm... I was gonna make the creators of dwarves, gnomes, and goliaths deeply intertwined in my new mythology (the dwarf and gnome god being siblings, the goliath and dwarf deities being married). I might throw halflings in as well, what with Stouts supposedly having dwarven ancestry

[Naanomi]

<cosmology stuff>

That is real close to the classic 2E Planescape explication; except that planetouched races can happen from any stock because ‘breeding’ is a different process to planar beings... and dragons have such powerful anima that they overpower restrictions

Orcs and elves had a specific restriction against breeding because of the animosity between their pantheons

[Dankus Memakus]

I don't think I saw anyone mention the D'Tarig who are a fun group of humans who came from the deserts in forgotten realms. They are potentially the descendants of human dwarf hybrids, they were very short and head weapon restrictions, and spoke a strange dwarvish pidgin language. All in all, they seem to have lost most of their dwarf like traits besides size but they are still fun.

[Sharur]

In the setting that I built for gaming in, there are half-dwarves, called Halflings if the other parent is Human, or Gnome if the other parent is an Elf (the creation of which also involves some Fey meddling). Humans are the base species, with other humanoids being offshoots. As a result of this, if a Dwarf and an Orc managed to sire and birth a child, that child would be human.

The reason why Halflings and Gnomes get special names while half-elves and half-orcs do not, is that the former "breed true", so e.g. two halflings will have halfling children, while the progeny of the later tends to based on their other parent (e.g. a half-elf and a human will beget human children, while a half-orc and a normal orc will have orcs).

[MrCharlie]

Ultimately, Tolkien doesn't really have half-Elves, they are all supposed to choose between being an Elf and being a Human (for some reason, choosing to be a Human binds all your future successors, choosing to be an Elf doesn't). Aragorn is fully human (there are more than 60 generations separating him from his nearest Elvish ancestor), with some special traits.
There is a strong indication (but no confirmation), that Saruman created Half-Orcs and Quarter-Orcs.

While it isn't fully explained, the best explanation is that being human is a blessing in Tolkien's mythos (as a true afterlife and God exists, choosing to die isn't as stupid as it seems) and thus by choosing to be mortal he blessed all his descendants; only a force like Sauron could steal the gift of mortality from men.

To answer the original question; there hasn't been much need for them because most DnD settings have "Primarily X" kingdoms, and dwarves are typically isolationist-so you don't get many opportunities. Also, dwarven women presumably scare off most pansy ass human men, given that they can out-drink them and two of the sub-races can out-lift them. There have been a couple sub-races proposed, from Kender to Derro, but not unifying mythos.

On the other hand, Hobbits had conspicuous geographical tribes that were "Dwarf-like" and "Elf-like" and "Man-like" depending on what the local dominant race of free-folk was, suggesting that hobbits might have been the product of dwarfs and men (+/-) elves filtered through several generations and geographically isolated.

I personally always run my homebrew settings as "Humans+dwarves=Halflings, Elves+Dwarves=Gnomes", which neatly solves the hybridization questions without requiring any work on my part (Mix all three and you get halflings).