LogFAQs > #885386330

shadowsword87 posted...

I guess the question is how it's done.
Druids already have that spell, it's called Awaken. They can do it as a level 5 spell.

Awake only works on plants and lower-level animals, though.

Granted, one could assume power enough magic users might develop a higher-level/ritual version of the spell that also reshapes the physical and mental traits of sapient beings, but that would still need a new name, so we're right back in the original boat.

My idea was mostly that a powerful heavy-magic race/culture (I was thinking about a Githyanki/Githzerai-esque sort of race) that could replicate most "technological" feats with pure magic would eventually decide that it would sure be swell to breed their own slave races to do all of their work for them (in sort of the same way humans are currently developing robotics). So they'd basically send recovery teams out into the wild, scoop up mostly primitive (or even feral) "lesser races" (in this case, gnomes and halflings), magically tinker with them for a bit, and then breed them over time like dogs, preserving strains they consider useful in some way, sterilizing out ones they view as negative traits.

In this specific case, the idea was that this race bred humans and dwarves out of halflings (with humans being the halflings who were bred for height and versatility while dwarves were bred for hardiness and compact strength), while elves and orcs were bred out of gnomes. Then each servitor race gets assigned its own specialized tasks (ie, you don't send an elf to go dig in the mines, you don't ask dwarves to hand you things off of high shelves).

Eventually, there was either a slave revolt that killed all the masters and destroyed their empire, and the slave races all sort of spread out on their own and started establishing their own cultures and kingdoms (and "Common" is probably a pidgin form of the empire's original language, since it's the one they all have in common to begin with, vis-a-vis Latin in Europe), or you go the "killed by decadence" route where the masters became so reliant on their slaves and so averse to personal effort that they eventually die out (like the Spacers in Asimov's Robot novels).

Either way, most of the surviving races would never admit to their own shameful beginnings, so whenever someone discovers an ancient magitech ruin somewhere they all just assume it was their own ancestors who built it "before the fall" or some other false scenario that cast their origins in a far better light (like, say, being the chosen race of the progenitors specifically blessed with their mandate, and thus inherently better than everyone else).


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