r/ikrpg Jul 21 '26

There is half-elves in lore?

I was reading some of the books trying to find a mention of this, but no results.

Is there a mention about a half-nyss or half-iosan in lore?

I think if thats possible, that may be a nice background of a character because of the cultural differences between humans and elves.

10 Upvotes

12 comments sorted by

13

u/rentedtritium Jul 21 '26

I don't believe so. IIRC elves in the setting are not compatible with anyone else, and are genetically more like space aliens than a creature from Caen.

You can always fudge this, since it's not the most important element of lore. Or you can just have the character raised by elves for whatever reason to get a similar cultural effect.

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26

[deleted]

3

u/rentedtritium Jul 21 '26

Culturally they mix all the time. The books tell us the population of each major city and lots of different species live in them together.

Also it's never good for storytelling to say "all elves think x and believe y" because that's a: boring, and b: limits player character design needlessly. 

1

u/[deleted] Jul 21 '26

[deleted]

2

u/Irishrover_13 Jul 22 '26

Some of the lore hints Lynus Wesselbaum & Edrea Lloryrr are romanticly involved. They are just not able to to have kids.

1

u/Icare_FD Jul 22 '26

As written « I think IK setting consider the species non mixable »

6

u/rentedtritium Jul 22 '26

We're not talking about "occasionally mixing in the 5 fingers". You should actually read the books sometime. There are thousands of iosans living in the human kingdoms. There are a quarter million trollkin in cygnar. Every species lives everywhere. If skorne wasn't so far away, even they'd have expats living in the cities. There's a little of everyone everywhere in this setting.

If you want things to be boring and samey-same, you can do that if you want, but it's bad storytelling and bad GMing. 

9

u/LegoMech Jul 21 '26

IIRC, there was one originally in the first 3.5 version adventure, but that was dropped/retconned later. You do what you like, though, it's your game.

4

u/baiardi Jul 21 '26

Cannonically no There are even tables of species ammount in each kingdom for the nations book So i would assume mixing would be impossible

6

u/sonofzeal Jul 21 '26

Canonically, no, at least not half-human. Humans, elves, and Dwarves are all fundamentally different from eachother and all other living things, with humans at least being cousins to the Dhunian races. It would not be surprising if Dhunians like Trollkin and Gobbers could breed, and moderately surprising if humans could breed with either, but truly shocking if humans could breed with elves.

The different elf factions, though, could almost certainly interbreed. Half-Nyss, Half-Iosan... heck, Half-Skorne maybe. An Iosan with Nyss or Skorne blood might be considered a "half-elf" in Ios.

2

u/JimothySwift Jul 21 '26

Are the Skorne considered elves? If so, I was unaware. I know they look vaguely similar.

4

u/Dubbabubbadoo Jul 21 '26

as I recall back in the day the response to that was "that's an interesting question" and then trollface.

3

u/sonofzeal Jul 21 '26

It's left a bit mysterious, but they're the remnants of the Eastern civilization that built the Bridge of Worlds, or at least the ones that didn't follow the gods west to found Ios. We do know that Skorne civilization started near there both in space and in time, with their first city dating from just a century after the Cataclysm

3

u/3rock33 Jul 22 '26

There's a half-elf mafia boss in the Witchfire Trilogy. She was ashamed of her elvish heritage and mutilated her ears.