Interspecies Romance in Tabletop Games.
The following games have their own pages:
- Blue Planet revolves around a water planet named Poseidon that's colonized by genetically modified humans and Sapient Cetaceans. Sexual relations between the two is relatively common, with common dolphins in particular said to be the most likely to form long-term relationships with humans due to similar coupling behaviors and their natural curiosity about us making us exotic in their eyes.
- Exalted:
- If it exists and can have sex, then some Exalted has had sex with it. The Lunars above all, that's how Beastmen came to be. If it makes a difference, the Lunars have the ability and usually the inclination to ask animals first, and shapeshift into the same species. Beastmen, for the record, are usually conceived when a Lunar and a human or a Lunar and an animal mate in a Wyld bordermarch... with the Lunar in a form different from their mate. (Geoff C. Grabowski once defended the Lunars' predilections by pointing them to Werewolf: The Apocalypse with the words "--- This Wolf Or The Earth Will Die". (Direct quote.))
- The game has rules for various types of "God-Blooded," beings with one normal mortal parent and one Exalted or non-human parent. That parent may be an Exalt, a faerie, demon, a god, an elemental, or even a ghost. Sex, let alone breeding with, anything besides a Dragon-Blood is taboo in Realm culture, and interspecies pairings are frowned upon by the Celestial Bureaucracy and many other cultures. But plenty of gods give the finger to their superiors and plenty of cultists like to summon demons for disturbing uses. For ghosts, reproduction requires an obscure and hard-to-learn power. Gods, Lunars, faeries, demon-worshippers, and Deathlords all value God-Blooded as useful minions (or slaves) with a measure of their parents' abilities but not nearly enough power to pose any threat to their creator or owner. They may also lack their non-human parents' frailties, such as Fae-blooded and Half-demons who can live in Creation indefinitely without problems. Lunars also like to spawn whole armies of Beastmen, since their own numbers are so limited.
- Interestingly, some God-Blooded are born to parents who subvert this trope; some gods have ways of reproducing that don't involve anything remotely resembling sex, especially those with totally non-human anatomy. If you get pregnant from inhaling magic pollen, does it really count as romance?
- Ironclaw only hints at the possibility of interspecies romances in the main book. However the main character of the novel Scars is the daughter of a grey fox noble and a red fox servant, and a raccoon has an unrequited crush on her. And the Book of Jade supplement has a legend of an ill-fated romance between a dragon prince and a peasant vixen; the dragon was killed by his jealous brother and the vixen turned herself into a dragon through force of will to avenge him, then she laid nine eggs and her sons developed dragon magic that gradually makes the user more draconic.
- In one of the story arcs of Magic: The Gathering Mirri
(a cat warrior) had an unrequited crush on her (human) childhood friend Gerrard.- Among the crop of post-Mending walkers, there seems to be a bit of Ship Tease going on between the human Planeswalker Jace and the Gorgon Planeswalker Vraska. Jace’s previous romance involved the immortal necromancer Liliana Vess. Meanwhile, a same-sex version is hinted at between pyromancer Chandra Nalaar and elvish druid Nissa Revane.
- Pathfinder shares much of this trope with Dungeons & Dragons, sometimes adding its own spin to it.
- Three Adventure Paths include modules where a romanceable "monster" appears; Undrella the harpy (in Legacy of Fire), Greta the winter wolf (in Reign of Winter) and Arueshalae the succubus (in Wrath of the Righteous). The first two characters are highly unusual in that they are, by default, Evil and malevolent, but can undergo a Heel–Face Turn if a PC courts them sincerely. Arueshalae is already past being Evil or malevolent, and falling in love with a PC grants her points towards her full redemption.
- In regards to half-orcs, the First Edition emphasized the Child by Rape characterization as part of its Darker and Edgier set-up. Somewhat hypocritically, no important half-orc characters have yet been presented who have this origin. Irijmka, the iconic Inquisitor, was found as a Mysterious Waif orphan and raised by a Pharasman temple orphanage. Irabeth Tirablade, a female half-orc paladin from the Worldwound adventure path,was born when her orc father genuinely fell in love with, and subsequently married, her human mother. Tsadok Goldtooth, The Dragon to a major enemy late in the Skull & Shackles adventure path, was born due to the friendship between his human father and orc mother blossoming into love after they helped each other escape from the pirate ship they were slaves aboard. Oloch, the iconic Warpriest, was born of a consensual dalliance (his human mom was an adventurer who openly enjoyed coupling with orcs who were amicable) and has several half-siblings implied to at least include further half-orcs of the same manner of conception. Second Edition largely moves away from the idea of half-orcs being the result of rape.
- Harpies need to abduct human men to have children... and it's also cultural tradition for the harpy to kill (and usually eat) her lover after the act. Especially if she gets pregnant by it.
- Hags reproduce by abducting humanoid males and conceiving offspring known as changelings, who are generally beautiful but hit the Uncanny Valley and must be mystically transformed to become new hags. In First Edition, only the hags' daughters are changelings, with their sons being ordinary humans that are generally eaten by the mother, but in Second Edition their sons are changelings as well and can also become hags, albeit more rarely.
- Rocket Age has the human Thomas Moore and Martian Princess Fayiltha of Polintal. Since Moore was such a hero to Polintal the city's Kastari declared him a Silthuri soul in a human body and allowed them to marry.
- Almost completely absent in Warhammer 40,000 (everyone is either an Absolute Xenophobe, asexual, or rigidly enforces breeding), but it pops up from time to time:
- Both the Dark Eldar and the followers of the Chaos God Slaanesh indulge in gratuitous interspecies rape on occasion, but that's primarily because their MO runs on Squick.
- Back when 40K was a parody, the Ultramarines had Iliyan Nastase, a human/Eldar hybrid psyker who was both their Chief Librarian and an Astropath. This is somewhat undermined by that same fluff also stating that Eldar have, among other horrendous biological impossibilities, zero body fat (but for some reason the females still have rather prominent breasts) and triple-helix DNA. As 40K got more serious, this quickly became yet another piece of weird early lore that fell into Canon Discontinuity territory.
- The Wrath and Glory RPG implies that this happens at the fringes of the galaxy where the Imperium has little to no control and interspecies mixing is common among both their border worlds and the large number of independent states and states-within-states. Namely, the "Flame of The Heart" card depicts a human man and an Eldar woman; for context, that's the card for starting an "amorous relationship" between your character and an NPC.
- Genestealers combine this trope with Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong, a sub-species of Tyranid that focus on infiltrating target populations. They do this by changing a target's DNA slightly, making the target absolutely devoted to the Genestealer and Tyranids in general, and horny. Any child of the targeted creature (known as a Brood Brother) is less of the parent race and more Tyranid, until by the fourth generation Brood Brothers (or Sisters) give birth to purestrain Genestealers.
- Warhammer Fantasy:
- Although "romance" wasn't involved, the earliest edition of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay had half-orcs in it, as well as a race called the Fimir, who consisted of sterile spellcasting females and fertile males, and thusly kidnapped human women to propagate themselves. Strangely, though most elements of that time (like half-orcs and gnomes) have been consigned to the dustbin of Retcon, Fimir get an oblique mention in the Sigmar trilogy from Black Library.
- Subverted with the Beastmen, where it turns out that despite accusations of ignorant peasants, Beastmen are mutated by Chaos and not born of a beast and a human (in fact, the Beastmen view the idea with as much disgust as humans do).
- There's a surprisingly large amount of this going on between elves and humans, especially considering elves generally look down upon other races and that cohabitation between the two species is limited to Laurelorn Forest, some Bretonnia-Loren border communities, and a handful of major cities with mixed species districts (mostly traders). Some examples:
- The Roleplay book Sold Down The River has a side story about the High Elf Immarana and Imperial human Adalbart Hensch-mann, who are lovers with particularly bigoted parents. How their story ends is up to the DM.
- In the same book, the Wood Elf Trancas co-owns a business with the human ex-sergeant Morgaine Bauersdottir, and it is noted offhand that they are both best friends and lovers. Trancas's description also notes that interested human women occasionally proposition him to no avail; implying that such a thing isn't unthinkable in the first place.
- The Roleplay 2e Character Compendium has a character named Hugo Dorshield. He was one of the few humans the Wood Elves trusted, which made him their go-between for trade with Quenelles. At some time in that position he and a Wood Elf woman became lovers. A xenophobic baron then forbade "consorting" between elves and humans (implying that happened often enough that he had to make a law against it, even among the xenophobic peoples of Athel Loren and Bretonnia), which led to the death of Dorshield's lover, after which he took up a vengeance crusade against the baron alongside some Wood Elf friends.
- One of the lead characters in "Gilead's Blood" is a half-elf; his mother was an unnamed human, and his father was the High Elf Nithrom.
- The WFB 2e book "Blood Bath at Orc's Drift" has a description of the event "F'yar's Revenge" where a prince named Laeron leads a mixed-species coalition to defeat various goblin armies and becomes the King of the Grand League of Ramalia. Said prince is referred to as half human and half elf, and his high position implies his parents were of similarly high status.
- In the Roleplay 4e book "Power Behind the Throne", Middenheim's elven bard Rallane has occasional dalliances with human women, was in a serious relationship with one, and is "hopelessly infatuated" with the elector-count's daughter, though he knows such a relationship would never be allowed by the count and she doesn't seem to regard him the same way.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: the most numerous "good guys" in the series, those of the Free Cities of Sigmar, are composed of multiple species that have been cohabiting for thousands of years since before the Age of Myth. Thus it's expected that such relationships have happened as they did in Fantasy, particularly among aelves and humans.
- Human Freeguild corporal Armand Callis and aelven Adventure Archaeologist Shevanya Arclis spend many months living together as lovers in the aftermath of "Callis and Toll: The Silver Shard."
- In his titular series, the aelven "Autumn Prince" Maesa takes the human woman Ellamar as his beloved, only to fall into despair when he inevitably outlives her. He still carries around her skull in his travels, while looking for a way to revive her.
- The World of Darkness: There are all sorts of of human/non-human goings-on in both settings, including vampires and werewolves. Most splats are non-human in some way, except Hunters and Mages, and most of them can mate and even reproduce with humans under at least some circumstances. The only ones truly unable to do so are Wraiths, being wholly immaterial. Indeed just about every supernatural engaged in romance with humans, even the vampires (though less so due to their deadness). Generally the likelihood of said romances are similar between the two versions of a given splat:
- Vampires are living corpses — although they can have sex if they choose, their sex drive is mostly so dead they're hardly ever in the mood — as are Prometheans, so they're sterile to begin with. Bizarrely, in the Old World of Darkness there were very unusual circumstances in which vampires and kuei-jin could actually have half-human offspring, but this was far from the norm.
Night Horrors: The Wicked Dead introduces the nWoD take on the Dhampyr, which is born when a human and a vampire engage in carnal relationships backed by magic or a massive amount of emotional focus — a deep sincere love is mentioned as the most common, and most tragic, cause of their creation. And because the laws of nature are already being broken by their creation, any combination of a vampire/human pairing can produce them. Even two men or two women. And when a heterosexual couple are the parents, the male can end up carrying the baby instead of the female — this is (fortunately) usually only caused by magic and tends to occur when it's a male vampire/female human couple. Male humans can carry the dhampyr safely... but delivery is another matter.
Even though Prometheans are sterile, it may happen occasionally that one finds themselves a parent. These children are known as Scions, and they're both able to sense when a Promethean draws near and unaffected by Disquiet. - Werewolves only hit lycanthrope status at puberty (though no one would ever consider trying to have sex with a werewolf in its War-Form...unless they were pretty much invincible or into self-snuff and that got creepy really fast). In Werewolf: The Apocalypse all the shapeshifters have families, including animal and in most cases also human Kinfolk who are, in almost all ways, entirely normal. Most same-shapeshifter pairings inevitably produce either a sterile and deformed Metis or no child at all, and even the Changing Breeds with fertile "Metis" can never produce enough to maintain their population without breeding with humans and their animal species. (Some Garou have speculated that Gaia designed them that way deliberately, to prevent them from ignoring the people they should be protecting.)
In Werewolf: The Forsaken, this changed for werewolves. Because of the Squick implications, werewolves no longer have sex with actual wolves, and view the idea the exact same way that humans do (although this hasn't stopped certain perverts). Werewolves cannot reproduce with other werewolves, as the result is a spiritual abomination that grows up to hunt werewolves. Humans with werewolf blood are known as "wolf-blooded" and are always marked by this blood. The Blood of the Wolf sourcebook states that werewolves are sterile in their wolf-shape, but also states that men can fraternize with wolves and sire normal wolf offspring (that are not and never will be werewolves). Now think about how those two statements are reconciled, or do not think about it. Night Horrors: Wolfsbane has a Werewolf Antichrist Dark Messiah who is the child of a werewolf and a wolf. He was born 100% human. - In Changeling: The Dreaming changelings are perfectly capable of having children; some are changelings themselves, some are ordinary humans, and some, the Kinain, inherit a touch of fae magic. In Changeling: The Lost, however, changelings are usually sterile, thanks to their transformation, but the occasional child has been known.
- The Fallen possess humans, and thus can mate and procreate as normal for a human. The Unchained, meanwhile, have human disguises so comprehensive they're able to reproduce in the same way, with the child inheriting their parent's connection to the workings of the universe.
- There was a flaw in the original Spell of Life which meant that the mummies it created were sterile. The improved version allows mummies to have human children.
- Vampires are living corpses — although they can have sex if they choose, their sex drive is mostly so dead they're hardly ever in the mood — as are Prometheans, so they're sterile to begin with. Bizarrely, in the Old World of Darkness there were very unusual circumstances in which vampires and kuei-jin could actually have half-human offspring, but this was far from the norm.
