That's As Good a Theory as Any Episode 1: Birth and Reproduction

A group of individuals from Artemis Games discuss the concept of sexual dimorphism in fantasy races such as elves and dwarves. They explore the idea that elves and dwarves could be different sexes of the same species, with dwarves being the females and elves being the males. They also discuss the possibility of dwarves being larval forms of dragons and kobolds being parasites that live on dragons. The conversation then turns to the origins of elves and dwarves, with suggestions that they are carved from stone or grown from trees. The group also speculates on the characteristics and vulnerabilities of these fantasy races based on their origins. Are you saying that Spock was once a Dwarven king? I have published my child. You can't burn down this village, it's full of plague. Maybe Spock's words were, um, regarding Cheetos? Hi, I'm Ali, I'm one of the Artemis team. I make up nonsense to entertain nerds. Today we're talking about birth and reproduction. It's a good place to start. Begin at the beginning. Hi, I'm Amy, I'm part of Artemis Games. I'm the one that you usually see. No shame on the store because I make little creations of monsters. I also do writing as well, but yeah. Hi, I'm Lars, I'm also part of Artemis Games. I'm not really sure what else I can add here. I apparently don't actually have any sort of physical presence since not having a video, I'm purely a virile being. You're obviously just one of our imaginary friends. I might be lying about that, I might be lying about that. I mean, according to a lot of things, reproduction starts with God, so you being a peer will make sense. Okay, I'll be God then. Still in the correct alphabetical order, that works. I'm Steve, I'm the other quarter of Artemis, and I had the idea of recording us chatting about a topic in worldbuilding, and we're trying it, so you'll see whether that's a good idea or not. The topic of reproduction, birth, sex, gender, that sort of thing. Okay, so as Gods, where do we want to start? With Genesis, apparently. Okay, so in the beginning there was Steve talking about an idea he had about Elton John. Sexual dimorphism in fantasy races. There is a big tendency, although it's less now than it used to be, for fantasy races to consist of weird monstrous male and human woman, but with different skin colour and maybe some facial oddities or something. So we're basically talking green alien space base? Yeah. That's not a thing with elves and dwarves, who are both famously absolutely non-sexually dimorphic. There is no way to tell whether an elf or a dwarf is male or female. Now, that can just be put down to they aren't, or humans can't tell because we're human and their sexual dimorphism doesn't match ours. But I had the interesting thought of, well, there are a few fantasy races that have unusual sexual dimorphism, or more sexual dimorphism than humans that don't just have the female look like a human. So I had the thought of, what if elves and dwarves were just a single species? And the apparent lack of sexual dimorphism then comes from the fact that, actually, you're only dealing with one sex when you're dealing with elves, and one sex when you're dealing with dwarves. But thinking about that led me into the weeds of, well, the obvious answer would be dwarves are the males and elves are the females. Dwarves are always associated with masculine traits and long beards and strong arms, while elves are hairless and live and... Oh, usually. Okay, they have less hair. Okay, yes, they have head hair. Yes. They have head hair. Yes. But no body hair. They're often depicted as dainty. I remember when we were playing Dwarf F.D.D., we used to always say that all elves were David Bowie and... All drow were Marilyn Manson. Oh, yeah, all drow were Marilyn Manson. I can't remember what we used to say dwarves were played by. Probably Brian Blessed, yeah. Yes, probably. I'm a dwarf! Sorry. But yeah, so, obvious answer to a human would be dwarves are the males, elves are the females. But if you look at their behaviour and cultural traits, actually, dwarves are the ones that stay in one place, that have wide, child-bearing hips, and elves have ridiculously slender bodies and therefore slender hips that would not give birth to anything with a human baby-sized head. But without great difficulty and a lot of pain. Yeah. Tend to live above ground. Depending on the version of elves, some of them move around quite a lot with the wild hunt. Some of them are homebodies in the forest, but we'll go with the wild hunt ones because that works for this theory. So, you've got dwarves then make most sense, actually, as the females of the species. You have dwarven warrens that they raise the children in until they're old enough that the male elves and the female dwarves are splitting off. And the elves are the males that travel across ground to a different warren to go and find mates there. In the same way as lions, the male cubs, when they get to a certain age, will leave the bride and look for a new bride. Yeah, it's a very common pattern in, well, most species that have gender dimorphism. Also with birds, the males tend to be far more showy and elves are far more associated with art. Well, that works. With less peacocks, more bowerbirds kind of level of showiness outside their body and creative rather than grown. But yeah. Or birds of paradise who honestly just look weird. Yeah. There are a lot of odd-looking male birds. Most female birds are far more normal. Well, yeah, for a given age. Because they're the ones that have to lay eggs for X amount of months in a nest where they have to be able to hide. Or there are a lot of species where they actually share that. Yeah, there are. So clearly elves and dwarves are not actually birds. No. Yeah. So that's my theory of dwarf-elf gender dimorphism. Elves and dwarves being the different sexes of the same species might seem like quite a lot of sexual dimorphism. But actually compared to, say, lions or gorillas or birds or especially anything in the insect kingdom, it's rather modest. It's just that humans are so incredibly low on sexual dimorphism for apes to begin with that it seems large compared to us. Yes. That seems reasonable to me as a theory. Right. Do we want to move on to something from Ali? I had a number of ideas of where dwarves come from because dwarves are the mystery ones. And I quite like the idea that they are actually the larval form of dragons. It's not my original idea, but I found it somewhere a while back and went, that's very cool, I'm stealing that. Sorry, I've researched that. Plagiarism is copying from one place, research is copying from many places. It goes like this. So dwarves dig underground. They gather a lot of treasure. When they have gathered sufficient treasure, that's a horde, and they hatch into a dragon. And I quite like this, at least for its comedy value. It might not be a necessarily practical way to think about, but it does suggest the idea that maybe some of the fantasy races that we are most familiar with, the elves, the dwarves, the halflings, whatever we're calling, specifically halflings, not hobbits, and maybe even dragonborns, that maybe they have another form that's a big monster. A bit of a bit of a soft side. Yes. In a similar vein, the idea that kobolds are actually parasites who live on dragons and make themselves useful to dragons as a way of keeping themselves alive, rather than being kind of worshipping dragons, as they're often portrayed. Back to the dwarves as dragons thing. It does raise an interesting question. So dwarves generally work in large groups to gather the golden gems. But dragons are generally solitary. So does that mean that in that model you would have some sort of death battle of the dwarves to determine which one gets to grow into a dragon? Well, obviously the king turns into a dragon and the rest of them get kicked out and then have to try and convince a wizard and halfling to go and help them kick out the dragon who used to be their king. Are you saying that Sprocket was once a dwarven king? No comment. That would be a breach of copyright and we don't want the lawyers. So it's absolutely not the case. But the idea that... I mean, the other thing, of course, is that the successful member of the brood beats the remaining members of the brood. I mean, that's very plausible. Or maybe they all merge into one being, like something from Power Rangers. At each scale actually used to be a dwarf. Like the kind of male limpid fish that latch onto the female and kind of waste away until they're just a brain and a... You mean the anglerfish. Anglerfish, yeah. Actually, a needle bit example is the Man of War jellyfish which is made up of different components of... So we're saying that dragons are actually a jellyfish made of dwarves? I think that's the conclusion we've just come to. OK, good. Somebody else could take over from that because I think that's a beautiful point to leave. All right, Amy. I don't have any thoughts on dwarves other than going back to some of the old myths of the idea that they are created from stone and the same with elves as well, that they come from a tree rather than they are beings that live in the trees. So rather than being born, the elves and dwarves are carved. Yeah. Yeah. I had a thought on that they were grown from their own tree. So if you were an elf bonded to a rowan then that might give you certain characteristics. If you were a birch, you might be, like, flighty and if you were an oak, you were tamed. The question is, though, if you are tamed to these items like stone or tree, if they were to get damaged, would you then get damaged? Well, that's the question. I mean, if you're carved out of a stone and become a dwarf, then if the stone that you were carved from, the cave wall you were carved from, were damaged, then no. But if you're bonded to a living tree, then yeah, maybe. That would explain why elves are quite so protective of their forest. Yeah, elves are basically dryads, but less obvious about it. Yeah. Yeah. Certainly works for wood elves. And then maybe the dark elves who live deep in the caves actually come from mushrooms. I like that idea, yeah. Try and mushroom forests deep in the caves. I would suggest that dark elves would have a more communal approach to things in some way. Yeah. I don't know why they're a skin colour, because mushrooms are very, there's lots of different colours of mushrooms. Yes, but the ones deep in caves tend to be like everything else that's deep in caves. Like? Pretty much albino. Yeah, true. Unless they live in the dark. Unless they live in the dark, yeah. I like the idea of dark elves that glow in the dark. Ooh, another interesting result of dark elves coming from mushrooms would be the sheer number of different sexes they would have. Do mushrooms have a vast number of different sexes? Well, at least some fungi do. Okay. Perhaps significantly more than the standard two. Oh, I didn't know that. I don't know which fungi it is, but some of them have. Yeah, I mean, I know there are a few that are basically hermaphrodites, especially the ones that are basically like the colonised ones. Okay, well, there's a headline, Why This Fungus Has Over 20,000 Sexes. So, good. Yeah, rather than drow with their matriarchal society, you get a fungus potentially stratified on sex in society, where, you know, there's no two that are actually the same sex, so it's fine. Yeah, the fratification is constantly changing as no one can actually agree, you know, who's on top of the, yeah. Sorry, I was going to say who's on top of whom, but that's a... Some of them are scheming bastards, because they have to be, it's actually a survival trait. Yeah. It actually turns itself around and becomes not, aha, they are evil because evil, but no, what they are is scheming and backstabbing, because that's how they survive. That's how they win in their hierarchy. Apparently there are fungal species that have, you know, a dozen or more, but there's one particular one, Schizophyllum commune, that has more than 23,000 different sexes. Flirting in the fungus world must be really complicated. Yes. I mean, I assume it's actually changing colour and releasing spores and... Yeah, Amy, stop being accurate, that is. No, I think changing colour and releasing spores are both things that... I'm just saying it's like flirting aspects. Yeah, I mean, birds do it, but yeah, even educated... No, sorry, you have something else. No, actually, it is the same thing, but... Yeah. Sure. But yeah, even if you don't want to use that idea for drow, there are, in a lot of fantasy settings, some form of explicitly fungus people. Yeah, and the idea that they actually have 23,000 different sexes, or at least a dozen, is probably an interesting one to run with. Yeah, so dwarfs being carved, does this mean that basically they don't have parents, they have sculptors? Yes. And there is no male, female, otherwise, they're just all dwarfs? Yeah, I mean, that would work. That would explain why there is no dimorphism, because there is only one sex, and not only one gender, you are a dwarf. Yeah, that seems reasonable to me. And obviously there would be some differences, and the idea of creative differences, and... Oh yeah, no, I mean, how are they carved? Of course, I've just had the thought, what happens if some dwarf starts getting into cubism or post-modernism? I was going to say, also, the whole thing of like, whenever you carve something, whenever you're creating something, it never comes out the same twice. I have reduced this dwarf that I have carved, to its essential aspect, beard in the corner, moans. I think I've seen gnomes a lot like this. You could still have a gender equivalent, if you wanted to, but it wouldn't really correspond to how humans think of sex and gender. It would be more like stonemason, jewelsmith, goldsmith. Jewelsmith obviously makes the eyes. Obviously, yeah. The goldsmith and silversmith probably make the nerves, or the hair, or beard, or something. Lots of depictions of dwarves actually have them being very mature. You very rarely see young dwarves. Yeah. Is that why? Because their hair and beard are made of silver, so that they come out with silver beards at birth? Yeah, their beards are made of silver, or copper, or gold, or steel. What? Conception. Birth. Finishing. Is there a word for when the statue's done? I have published my child. I mean, would you make the joke of, you've now got a parasite for 18 years when you give birth? Yeah. I mean, maybe it's done when it gets up and starts asking for breakfast. Damn, I forgot to cast this one with a full stomach again. Maybe such words were, um, We got a Cheetos. What's Cheetos, specifically? It's a long-running thing of, I wanted Weetos for breakfast and kept saying Cheetos. And, yeah. Yeah, you want cheese curls for breakfast. Yeah, no, that's obviously a thing. Cheese for breakfast seems like an interesting plan. I like this. It's continental. Yeah? It's weird, continental, right? Just depends which continent. Um, Galarian? No, that's a world, sorry. It probably is actually reasonably reasonable for a breakfast in Nantuck because you'd need the calories, unless they do a full English. Full Elven. What's a full Elven breakfast? That's another, that's the next subject, is food, maybe. Unless we decide to go Biblical and the next subject is Exodus and it's all about moving. Yeah, that's a possibility, but yeah. Then we'll get to, like, Leviticus and have no idea what we're doing. It's not much for guessing. No, Leviticus isn't much for guessing. Leviticus is all about leprosy. Oh, OK. Diseases. Yeah. Right, OK, so diversion is what we might do next. Gone. What more births? Um, it's not fantasy races, but it is, but it's not fantasy playable races, if you like. Where and how did monkey bees or an owl bear? Who decided to put an owl and a bear together and that they would mate? I mean, I'm always convinced that they put them together and they mated. I mean, we have an answer to this. It is the box. You put any two species in it, any two animals in it, you shake and they come out fused into one animal and angry. Wouldn't you be angry if you'd been put in a box and shucked up? With a bear, yeah. Or with Jeff Goldblum and a fly. We also decided that apparently this box was stolen in recent years by Iceland because they made chicken tikka lasagna, which is wild. Right, OK. See, I just think monkey bees, it started with these are cool words and then went backwards to static. I don't actually think frail snails fall in this section because frail snails are just a snail that someone has stuck frails onto. They're not really a mismatch of two creatures. They're chimeric, if not a chimera. Well, because the frails are an inanimate object. Yeah. It's not living, so it's only a snail. Maybe someone got a living magic weapon that was a frail, that was a sentient magic weapon and stuck it in a box with a snail. OK, but still it actually isn't living because basically a chimera means that you have two different species. Oh, now we're going to have a conversation about what the nature of being alive is and is a sentient magical weapon alive. No, but chimeric specifically means you have more than one set of DNA. In a biological sense, yes, but in the mythological sense, no. Yeah. In the mythological sense, it's a bunch of animals stuck together apparently at random. Well, no, it's a head of a lion and a tail of a scorpion and the wings of a bat and the body of a penguin or something, I don't know. That's the chimera. There are a number of chimeric animals, including things like griffins. OK. Lions. Yeah, but the original. The idea of combining things with inanimate objects now has me picturing a modern centaur, which is the upper half is a human, the lower half is a Vespa. That's just cruel. I was only going to say the tank. I mean, it depends how cool you want the centaur to be. I think centaurs are inherently cool, so you have to give them a Harley. Come on. I think a Vespa can be cool. It's a very different kind of cool than a Harley. Yeah. I think top half human, bottom half Vespa is... Simply ridiculous. I think Chuck Tingle would be in favour. I'm not sure that's a good thing. I was like, is that our criteria now? If in doubt, refer to Chuck Tingle. I mean, he'd probably be OK with that. Please, somebody think of another creature and how they're born, made or otherwise. OK, so, like, Genasi, creatures that are people that are kind of tight, fire elemental, half human, half elemental. In the most crude way possible, who fucks a fire elemental and how? It would be very painful if they weren't there. Half face palm, but face palm. I mean, it's got to have been a bard, right? It's what? It's got to have been a bard, right? It's got to have been a bard. It's got to have been a bard, yeah. Probably the sorcerer, because the other answer is the wizard did it. I mean, at least a stone elemental could be suitably carved and, well, it may be a touch uncomfortable with enough loot to not actually just kind of kill you. But a fire elemental, I mean, that's not going to be good if everything is made of fire. Potions of fire resistance exist. Just make sure you use protection. Well, not too much protection, otherwise you won't produce any Genasi. Oven gloves. Oven gloves, yes. I'm now picturing a fire elemental chugging potions of fire resistance. I wouldn't think it was human. I mean, I'm... No, no, no, because imagine if the fire elemental could be the one that gets pregnant. They're going to have to get enough fire resistance potion into the baby. Because most fire Genasi aren't up to being surrounded by fire 24-7. I'm now just imagining the obstetric appointment over, What's wrong with my baby? You set it on fire! It would be quite an interesting ultrasound, wouldn't it? Yes, you could just see here. That's an interesting alternative source for fire Genasi, is just plain drinking too many potions of fire resistance during pregnancy. Yeah, so that would make sense. But, Amy, going back to the ultrasound, if you have an air elemental, an air Genasi, OK, we've got an ultrasound and, well, that's not the noise that it normally makes. OK, so the steam tech in me is now trying to work out how to do ultrasounds in a standard medieval fantasy setting. Trying. You get a special crystal ball and you kind of roll it over their stomach. No, no, the crystal balls are the earth elementals. Is that where crystal balls come from? Yes. Castrating earth elementals? Yes. Or maybe they're earth elemental eggs. Do elementals lay eggs? That's why earth elementals are so very often a monster, because they're just pests at humanity in general. You stole my important bits! I hate you all! This seems like a conclusion to come to, yes. Sorry, that was a poor choice of words. I mean, I was kind of musing on this idea earlier and got to the idea of, Doctor, I've got a burning sensation with IP, what's happening? Did you have sex with a fire elemental earlier? Well, yes. OK, so what you need is a very cold bath, because what you have is fire crap. When the steaming stops, you can get out. Can you just look down the water? Phil, be glad it wasn't a water elemental, because then the cure would be the other way round. However intense the infection, I do not feel that setting fire to your bits is ever going to be up there in medical treatment. No. Um, I mean... I've seen some of the things that they now do to clean said part, and the whole glitter thing that apparently exists. I'm sure someone will try it. I'm sure someone already has. I mean, I think that's probably what happens if you get an infection from an earth elemental, is a quittery bit. Craft herpes. Reproduction to basically... I mean, although sexually transmitted diseases with other species could be a problem, because, I mean, if you get serious infection of crabs, you need to shave off all the hair. So what happens if a dwarf gets a serious infection of crabs in their beard? They're not going to be happy about that. I mean, I have heard that happening with homeless people, actually, that they'll get it, like, everywhere, even in their head hair. Yeah. So, yeah, a dwarf with it in their beard is not going to be a happy dwarf. I would assume that dwarves probably engage in grooming, much like most apes do, of, like, picking bits out of each other's beards. Okay. As a kind of pack bonding. I know quite a few people that have beards, and I've never seen them do that, but okay. Yeah, but how many of them are dwarves? That's right. Yeah. I mean, humans have our own pack bonding mechanisms, but for a lot of apes and monkeys, grooming is a big thing. Although, talking of pack bonding mechanisms in this episode, do any species work like bonobos? Bonobos, also known as pygmy chimps, are famously, their pack bonding mechanism is having sex with each other. A lot. I don't know. Is bard a species? No. Bard is not a species. Although we could diverge at this point to how to deal with your horny bard. Or horny sorcerer, or horny paladin. I mean, I feel like technically, actually, your tieflings and your cambians could be, since the theory that a lot of them are demons, but the theory, it's not just demons, they usually come from incubus or succubus. So I imagine that actually, yeah, that might be their bonding thing. Hmm. So, er... I mean, considering everything that's been... Five sexual tiefling orgies. I think that's the name of my new band. Um... Interestingly, orgy means day in Italian. I think it's day. Well, I mean, it's a way to spend your day, I guess. Apparently, if you're a tiefling. I mean, considering every traditionally half-elf, half-orc, whatever, are all half-human, maybe it's human to do that. Maybe that we are meant to be half-elf, but it's never actually specified what the other half is. Yeah, it's generally assumed it's human. What is a half-elf, half-dwarf? A dwelf? Well, in that one game we ran, it was... That was where halflings came from. Yeah, that was where halflings came from. And goblins as well, it turns out. Inherited the height of a dwarf and the build of an elf. Yeah. Yes. Actually, did ogres also come from there, and inherited them the other way around? I think so, yeah. Ogres and elves. Yeah, okay, so ogres and halflings are actually the same species, I like this as a theory. Talking about halflings... I think that was just because we got a crowbar and we were trying to make everything descended from the elves. No, we were trying to make it a relatively few starting species. We got it down to, I think it was three or four? Yeah, something like that. Elves, humans, and dwarves, ancestors. Trufae, the elemental dwarves, and whatever the first humans were. Oh, Daeva, angels. Yeah, I think there was something else as well. I think that might have been it, and then everything else was derived from there. Maybe. And almost 90% of none of it was actually relevant. Almost all of it was a fun exercise in worldbuilding and nothing more. Which has to be acknowledged, was fun. Yes, I mean, that's kind of the whole point of this podcast, so... Yes, is that worldbuilding is fun and you should do it more often. Yes. So, talking about halflings, earlier me and Amy were talking about the concept of what species might have litters, like beastkin and the like, that are similar to animal species that have litters. And I've come to the realisation that I don't know why, but to me it makes massive amounts of sense that halflings would have litters. I kind of agree, and I don't know why either. Yeah, I have the same feeling, but I'm not really sure why. I think it's the big family structure, like the idea that they all have tons and tons of siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. How do you get that without, A, exhausting your females, or B, having multiple births? Perhaps not litters per se, but regularly having twins and triplets. Yeah, I mean, you might not want to go to the full extreme of five or six, but two or three. I mean, a lot of your bigger mammals, like your bears and stuff, tend to have no more than three. Yeah, two or three. Yeah, but halflings are small, so they can have lots. That's an interesting kind of thing to fine-tune. How big is the average halfling litter? Obviously, it's not going to be like 30, because then you'd only have one set of parents in a halfling village. I mean... That is just how they are structured. A halfling village is actually literally just one family. It's touching on probably one of the other episodes, but that assumes that 30 of them live to any kind of age. Because one of the things about litters is the reason you have that many is because halflings will die in childhood. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I think infant mortality is relevant. That and the Victorian poor people. You know, why do you have lots of kids, so some of them survive? To me, it's one of the things, because I don't really think halflings live in a typically harsh environment, or have to deal with... The natural predators are halflings. I mean, goblins, orcs... Halflings are known for being good cooks. Maybe that's actually a typo. And they're actually good cooks. So everyone just wants to eat a halfling. I mean, Warhammer definitely has that as a thing. The Warhammer fantasy setting. There are ogres that keep halflings around, because they're good cooks. Because if they're not good at cooking, they become snacks. So the halflings always make sure to have some food ready. So they don't become the food. Yeah, okay, I didn't know that. But that makes a certain amount of sense. It means the cooking skill suddenly becomes, again, it comes back round to not cultural, but survival. Yeah. It's got all of the major fantasy races covered. So in 40k, of course, they're fungal. In 13th age, you had them, say, just kind of growing out of the ground, where the ground was corrupted. Yeah, when there'd been lots of war. Yeah, that's actually, I'm pretty sure that's part of the core 13th age setting, is that orcs just kind of come from areas of devastation. Never specified exactly how they come to be in those areas, but areas of devastation will have orcs, just because they're areas of devastation. So I just took it. Yeah, no, they are just kind of born of it. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I'm not sure how that ties into orcs were actually created by the Elf Queen, but somehow it works. Which was also part of that game. The Orc Lord was basically a force able to animate the devastation of the land into a weapon against the person who devastated the land. Ah, no, that makes a lot more sense. I like that. And then it kind of went out of control and became a problem once the original enemy they were meant to be attacking was dealt with. Yeah, had I known that, I should have had the Lich King's Island awash with undead orcs, shouldn't I? Oh well, it was fun anyway. Yeah. I mean, of course there is the possibility that that's utter nonsense in the same way as the theory that bees are created from decomposing veal, which was one of the Greek philosophers. I want to say Aristotle, but I'm not convinced. I mean, orcs are an odd one because they get used in so many different ways in different sorts of fantasy. Sometimes they're standing for the natives of a region that's being colonized and sometimes they're just basically monsters. Yeah. Yeah. And there were a lot of suggestions to use them as that twist to have people view them as the monsters and then reveal that they're actually the native equivalents. But that's a hard one to do properly because there's a big danger of over-establishing the monstrousness. It's been done a lot of times, often badly. Yeah. Talking about that does bring me to one of the things I wanted to bring up, which was my theory that you can't have children of an evil race. Oh, like we did in Wicked Ones? Yeah. I firmly believe you cannot have a purely evil species that actually has children. Because in order to have children and raise them, rather than have things that can look after themselves from day one, you have to have a willingness to look after something smaller and weaker than yourself. And if you have that, then there is at least the capacity to care about others. Okay. So, if you want purely evil Orc, you can't then have Orc villages with Orc children in them that have to be killed. Because if they were actually children that are being given care by their parents, then the parents have to be capable of giving care. But what you could have is Orc, like the fungal ecology, or Orcs give birth to fully ready-to-fight goblins that then grow into the adult Orc. Or Orcs lay eggs in nests that they then abandon. Yeah. Like some species of snakes do. Hmm. I do call it the idea of little goblins that go, I'm going to be an Orc! And everyone's like, okay. Now how about us? When I grow up, I want to be older! Yes, dear. Lot of the Rings has Orcs and goblins are the same thing, just different names. And it's kind of the goblin name gets applied to the smaller ones more often. Yeah. So a tribe of Orcs might actually be a single family unit. A single clutch of eggs that have all hatched together. And they will rampage across the countryside until they find another Orc warband that's similar, and then procreate with them in what is probably a massive fight to the death. But that's Orcs for you. Yeah. And then they find eggs or babies of whatever sort, whatever form the babies take, in this wasteland. So as far as anyone's concerned, the Orcs come from the wasteland. Yeah, yeah, okay. So Orcs kind of reproduce like Oxypi in that there's no intergenerational knowledge passed on. Hmm. Okay. Unless it's somehow passed on by some kind of magical something or other. Oh yeah, because they reckon that some insects have this, like a genetic memory marker. Yeah, or epigenetic stuff where it's small changes to the way the DNA is expressed based on what they've experienced during their lifetime. Yeah, and then there's weird things like butterflies that migrate, and always follow the same migration path. But it takes three generations for them to actually follow it in one direction, so how do they know how to get back again? Hmm. That's very odd. You're saying insects and the path on their DNA. I always thought that it was social insects, that the individual insect doesn't know much, but the hive knows everything that's happened to it. Or the thermite mound. I mean, yes, the hives, but butterflies migrating don't follow that model. No, I think that when the same TV programme I watch says, we don't actually know how they do this. Yeah. Which is always a bit of a bit of a shock. I've now got the question in my mind of, are pixies migratory? Are pixies migratory? That's the question. No, no, we don't specify where pixies come from, which is more of a to the this week's theme. I hope it isn't this week. Yeah. You're not planning on doing more of these? Oh, I am, just not weekly in my head. I know you're not weekly. But yeah, so, getting back to reproduction, Amy, you had a couple of other questions or thoughts? Okay, so mostly it's things like, you know, do the animal-like species in games work like they do in real world? So we discussed the idea of giving litters, and I think in my mind it makes perfect sense that shifters have litters. One of the ones that I thought of is, any species that lays eggs are like your dragonborn, your aerococca. Aerococca? I'm not really sure how you pronounce the bird one. Birdy people? Yeah. Do they stagger their laying? So you basically get like you do in, typically birds of prey, where you have one born earlier than the others. You will always have a run for the litter. Hmm. I think that will depend on what sort of environment they're in and what sort of culture you want them to have, wouldn't it? Because staggering the hatchings leads to a more established pecking order. Yeah. But it also helps if the young needs a lot of looking after to stagger the hatchings because by the time the last one hatches, you're done feeding the first one, and actually the first one could be helping to feed the last one going out and hunting. Yeah. Oh, do you have hatchlings of your own? No, it's my little brother. Yep. This does actually lead on to something else that I have on my list to ask, and that is the sort of inverse of reproduction, which is contraception. I think that we touched on it earlier when we talked about genasi. Yeah. But is there anything special, magical, interesting that we can talk about, about fantasy? Do, for example, the shifter sort of class of races, the beast skin shifters, bird people, cat people, the Baxi, whatever they call them, do any of those, can they control their reproduction like a human can? And do they? I mean, can humans is a question in a fantasy setting. I suppose that's a big search question. I mean, other than by saying, no, thank you, dear, I've got a headache, are there, specifically, are there ways to control reproduction in your fantasy work? Whatever that is. Having a kind of fairly common magical herbal potion is certainly one option. Yeah, we're all aware of the, in the Victorian times, there was a plant that was commonly used for this kind of thing. Are you thinking of silthum, the Roman plant? Yeah, it was commonly used because it apparently did encourage the idea of miscarriage, at least. It didn't prevent you from getting pregnant, but it usually encouraged your body to reject the baby, I think. There have throughout history been various herbal preparations that prevent successful pregnancy, let's go like that. Yeah, preventing the egg implanting is often a lot easier than preventing the conception in the first place. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, throughout history, there have been various other forms of, I'm going to say, condoms, which most of them didn't work, because some of them were made from silk or wool, and, well, yeah. It's water-solving it! Exactly! This is why it didn't work! I mean, I thought boating testing was... I thought boating testing was really cold! What?! That's not a condom, that's a wheelie warmer! Yes! I'm just not sure why anybody would think that was... I mean, the one that was made of sheepskin, sheep guts, that makes almost a certain amount of sense. I mean, that did work. Yes. Yes. Metal made out of guts worked, because guts are, for obvious reasons, not permeable. No, it worked, indeed. I mean, I tend to, when doing fantasy settings, have some level of contraception available, just for the sake of avoiding that sort of story that just... The way all of the, why aren't you barefoot and pregnant? Yeah. It allows you to have female PCs, female antagonists, protagonists, and, yeah. I mean, a lot of making it more common to have women in non-traditional roles comes down to lower infant mortality, because if there's contraception but infant mortality is so high that society wants that many children, then you're going to have a problem. Yeah. What if you have access to magical healing? Then there's a whole different societal question of how common is magical healing, and not just, my baby is ill, well, I'll just take it to the clerics. There was the definition of fantasy humans as like medieval humans, but with better plumbing. Yeah. Even just better plumbing on its own lowers infant mortality quite a lot. Yes. But if you assume that a functional fantasy medievalist society... Yes. That's too many adverts. It's better plumbing and access to something resembling medical care, but enough people have the treat skill or the first aid feet or whatever it is, but you don't get the infant mortality rate, and you don't get the adult mortality rate at the other end, because one reason you have to have lots of babies is if you're all dead at 40. Then you need to maintain your workforce. Yeah, I think fantasy settings are generally more interesting if people aren't dying of, you know, regular diseases. They're dying of dragon attacks. Yeah. You have to survive long enough to die from the big bad, otherwise, you know, the dragon comes along, and I'm sorry, there was a jail fever last week. Tough. You can't burn down this village. It's full of plague. We're getting rid of infections through the application of fire again, aren't we? A full circle there. I mean, you could actually see a dragon ruling over a region dealing with an upcoming plague by just burning down the villages around the edge of their territory. There's a plague in the neighbouring kingdom. I'm just going to burn a line between our kingdom and theirs, and no one can cross it. Indeed. But now we're getting on to Leviticus. Yes. The topic of birth is continued in our next podcast. Until then... Thanks for listening to That's a Good Ethereum, brought to you by On The Shelf. We are... Join us on Facebook, Instagram, or Discord, and support us on Ko-Fi, Patreon, or our regular newsletter. Thanks for listening. Bye.