Dwarf-Human Crossbreed

The crossbreed joins a dwarf's stamina and raw power to a human's reach and agility. Adults stand 6 to 7 feet and weigh 250 to 275 pounds, the strongest nearly 300, always lean because their metabolism burns everything into muscle and motion. Skin is usually fair, sometimes a dwarf's coppery hue. The face is human but altered: heavy brow ridges, pointed ears swept back, and almost always a bald scalp. Slaves are tattooed young to mark owner, trade and lineage, and gladiators to show team, favored weapon and victories.

One raised by both parents speaks human or dwarf with an 80% chance of fluency in the other. Most are raised apart and speak the slaves' common tongue, as well as their owner thought necessary.

Masters often pair a human and a dwarf solely to breed a gladiator, and crowds adore the results. Favored weapons are spears, swords, impalers and bone weapons, and wrist razors delight arena crowds. Crossbreeds gain +2 damage with hand-held and thrown weapons. Unarmed, they add +1 damage on punching and wrestling results and 5% to their knockout chance per hit.

About half have a psionic wild talent (check each at 50% and determine the talent normally). A crossbreed outworks any human, sustaining heavy labor such as stonework or running for 24 hours, medium labor like climbing, mining or jogging for 36, and light labor like walking or training for 48. Afterward eight unbroken hours of sleep clears any nonmagical fatigue, and they keep a human 16-and-8 schedule when they can, since irregular hours shorten their lives.

Sterile and mostly enslaved, crossbreeds have no history, culture or communities, and even free ones live isolated, lonely lives. The slave trade in them is lucrative: one sells for as much as a dozen humans, and many change hands repeatedly within a single city.

Resentful parents often shun the child, who runs wild until it is taken away, fed, minimally taught, and trained by adolescence for labor or combat. Laborers learn construction and slave management before returning to the slave pens. A winning gladiator is a prize investment, pampered by servants who oil him and fetch food on command, though never allowed to forget he is property; commoners' jokes about pampered crossbreeds sting those who lived it.

Head tattoos read like a record: the core design names the owner, such as a city-state's templars or a merchant house, weapon marks tell handlers what to bring, tallies just above the neck count wins, and small pictures beside them record monsters killed in the arena. Free crossbreeds loathe their ink and may fight anyone who mentions it.

Under 20% are free, and they avoid busy lands for fear of slavers. Most sell their fighting skill, but some become priests, psionicists or merchants. Elf tribes respect their elflike endurance, and one may pass their initiations. A free wanderer carries a few days' or weeks' food and water, basic gear, perhaps metal weapons from the arena, and carefully hidden money; one in four rides a claw-runner or pack insect and may lead pack beasts laden with trade goods.

Only a human and a dwarf, of either sex, can conceive one, which may take months, followed by a perilous 12-month pregnancy and a hard birth. A human mother lives through the pregnancy only 40% of the time and through delivery 40%; a dwarf mother manages 60% for each. If the mother lasts to term, so does the child, but its own odds of living through delivery are 75% whatever the mother's race. A skilled midwife, called a mulmother, adds +10% to all these chances and is highly prized by breeders.

Crossbreeds often take human, and less often dwarf, life partners and adopt the orphans that the harsh world's wars supply endlessly. Their emotions run the full range. They live about 90 years.