Interspecies Romance/Tabletop Games

Other Works

 * 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: 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 shapeshifter-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 Anti Christ Dark Messiah who is the child of a werewolf and a wolf. He was born 100% human.


 * In Changeling: The Dreaming Changelings, while usually sterile due to Arcadia's nature, don't pass on any magic touches to any half-human offspring they do have. These offspring are called Kinain.
 * Demons possess humans, and thus can mate and procreate as normal for a human.
 * 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.
 * Averted in Warhammer 40,000 as all species in 40k are exceedingly xenophobic and view all others as lower than animals, thus making even the idea of interspecies romance horrifying and purge-worthy. However, both the Dark Eldar and the followers of the Chaos God Slaanesh do induldge in gratuitous interspecies rape, but that's primarily because their MO involves raping anything that moves.
 * Or anything that doesn't move. And if it was moving and then it stopped.
 * Fans of the Imperium of Man respond to this trope with "Fucking Xenos?!? Those fucking Xenos!"
 * It is hinted in some of the older fluff, however, that the Ultramarines do have a human/Eldar hybrid among their number, though this is somewhat undermined by the fact that the same fluff also states 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.
 * Most, if not all, of the older fluff is generally disregarded by the producers themselves (though fans, naturally, have a tendency to latch onto elements they like)... understandably, seeing as how the oldest fluff includes such disasters as Squats (drunken space dwarves who drove around on motorized tricycles), the Sensei (immortal, sterile children of the God-Emperor, who he didn't even know existed) and the Illuminati (a conspiracy of humans who were possessed by daemons, then managed to force them out and become untouchable super-psykers as a result).
 * The Illuminati were the human version of the eldar Harlequins, which are still around. Eldar are much more powerful psykers compared to humans, but the idea is not far-fetched.
 * Actually, there is a monster (or race of monsters) in 40K devoted to this trope. Genestealers are a sub-species of Tyranids that focus on infilitrating target populations. They do this by changing a target's DNA slightly; this makes the target absolutly 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 (well, Sisters) give birth to purestrain Genestealers.
 * 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 "F--k 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?
 * In one of the story arcs of Magic: The Gathering Mirri (a cat warrior) had an unrequited crush on her (human) childhood friend Gerrard.