re: Mul birthing in Ask the Staff

[ale six]

Just wanted to pipe up about this one. My first PC was a Borsail servant who had a pretty long and extensive career with the House that ended with her being given the "honor" of bearing a mul child. She was stored and I was told she would have a pretty gruesome and excruciating death once the pregnancy was carried to term. (Naiona is a great imm!)

From what I understand only Borsail and Winrothol possess the techniques to breed muls at all, and given that the mother's don't survive I can hardly imagine it's a voluntary thing. Most likely just coaxing dwarves and humans to mate is a tough job, unless you could find that one special dwarf whose focus is "Father as many muls as possible."

The other thing to consider is that female dwarves don't exist, at least judging by PC trends. I had always imagined all the couplings to involve dwarf men and female women, myself.

[Wykydtronn]

Some composition of their bodies and minds tends to make dwarves highly resistant to magick of all kinds, and their high endurance usually renders them virtually (or literally) immune to poisons.

To me that means an immune system that won't quit.

With that in mind, I always speculated that a dwarf female's immune system would attack anything that their body would consider "foreign".

So they would need a human's weaker immune system to bare the mul child.

I can only imagine what a female's body must go through in order to feed, grow, and take care of a creature that it was never designed to take care of anyways.

[John]

Seeings how Ale Six and Xygax let the "mul mothers die" cat out of the bag, there is a very simple explanation on why humans are used to birth muls. Humans are the most populous race in the Known World. If I have 20,000 human slaves and 3,000 dwarf slaves, I'll impregenate the humans over the dwarfs.

[RunningMountain]

Actually I believe the reasoning is quite simple. A mul when born is quite large. A female dwarf doesn't have the cervix/fetus whatever to bear such a large child at birth. Only a human does, and even then, the mul child is usually cut from the stomach. At least on Darksun this is how it goes. So the mother doesn't survive because she can't get the baby out naturally, it has to be cut out by the overseer slaver who wants that mul to sell for 10k.

-R

[Nao]

I'd imagine dwarves to have the room for a bigger child rather than humans - they aren't that short, but realy borad, right?

Also, dwarf babies would have a wider head and shoulders, too, so the birth canal in dwarven women would have to be wider - the idea of human women giving birth to muls always struck me as a bit odd.

Unless the more narrow borth canal prevents the mul to get out early when it gets too large for the little room that a woman can provide, while with a dwarven mother, it would be born early..

[Anon Kank]

Its not a secret, that the mother of a Mul dies.  Its pretty common knowledge.  I can't reach the docs where I'm at, its filtered out as a 'game' but I'm pretty sure its mentioned somewhere in there.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mule

This is likely the origin of the reason that the mother of most muls are
human.  A female-dwarf/human-male pairing may result in something
that is not (or not quite) a mul, and so not worthwhile to slavers to
breed.

[Tamarin]

What would happen if you bred an elf or half-elf with a dwarf?

[Xygax]

What would happen if you bred an elf or half-elf with a dwarf?

They are likely genetically incompatible, so while it might be physically possible to mate them, no offspring would result.

-- X

[Tamarin]

What about halflings?  I'm actually curious about all the possibilities between the various biped species that all reproduce with similar sexual organs.

What about gith?  I know they're supposed to be distant cousins of elves, so is it possible that you could breed one with an elf, or with a human?

[Xygax]

To defray having to provide a grid-table of all the races and the results of their unholy couplings, I'll just say this:  If you haven't seen a half-<race-1>, half-<race-2> thing in-game, then it is probably impossible to make without magick or horrible mutations, and the result is not profitable relative to the amount of effort required in fashioning it.

-- X

[SpyGuy]

I also imagine that the mother of a mul would be considered useless as well after the birth even if she survived.  It's perfectly conceivable that with a Vivaduan or even a skilled surgeon on hand some of the mothers could go through the process alive.  But why would Borsail or Winthrol ever want these women, most likely traumatized from a rather violent and unnatural birth, to live?  They'd be more or less useless as labor slaves, their bodies likely couldn't bear another child and it is likely the woman would gain some knowledge of the process of birthing a mul that the Houses for obvious reasons want kept secret.  More than that they're just one more uncontrollable tie to the mul.  Ensuring the mother dies guarantees the mul won't even have rumor of a family or life outside of the slaver's grasp, and the potential for guilt at the pain their own existence has caused would likely feed the mul's abject submission to slavery.  So I'd argue that even if the mothers of muls were able to survive it'd be in the best interest of the slaving houses just to kill them off anyway.

[RunningMountain]

There was an elfling. (halfing and elf). Sorak in the darksun series. He was a badass.

[Cale_Knight]

Interesting and entirely plausible take on things, SpyGuy.

[Delirium]

There was an elfling. (halfing and elf). Sorak in the darksun series. He was a badass.

How.. did they...

I mean...


:shock:

[ThirdEye]

What exactly are the Dark Sun series? I've never read them before.

[Sir Diealot]

Dark Sun is a DnD module/world..  Arthas I believe, is the name of the world.  Sorcs/Elems are less hated, and more common..

[Larrath]

Athas.
Arthas is the paladin prince in Warcraft III.

Dark Sun is similar but starkly different from Arm.  Its world is similar to Zalanthas, only everyone seems to get along so they group together.  Plus metal is far more common, and there are a few common creature we don't like cordlu, which is like a sunback lizard and an erdlu if I understand it correctly.
They have templars and muls, but ours are cooler.

What is this thread about again?

[Naiona]

I don't know nothing 'bout birthin' no muls, Miss Scarlet!  I don't know nothing!

[FiveDisgruntledMonkeysWit]

Delirium wrote:

RunningMountain wrote:
There was an elfling. (halfing and elf). Sorak in the darksun series. He was a badass.

How.. did they...

I mean...

He jumped.

[Vesperas]

Delirium wrote:

RunningMountain wrote:
There was an elfling. (halfing and elf). Sorak in the darksun series. He was a badass.

How.. did they...

I mean...

He jumped.

Chihwahwa meets Great Dane.  They fall in love.  

Isn't it beautiful?



Wow, so, this is a confirmation that -all- breeders die?  No surviving stragglers?  Hmm.

[Cale_Knight]

Wow, so, this is a confirmation that -all- breeders die?  No surviving stragglers?  Hmm.

As I understand it, it's a very, very large "usually."