In the spirit of the other game started by Killer GM, let's start creating characters and setting elements that challenge the gender binary concept. Break out your PHBs, MMs, and setting books! It's time to look for those intriguing openings.
Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to create interesting possibilities for gender diversity that goes beyond the male/female dichotomy. It can be a character, a creature, a culture, a place - whatever. It can be short, long, or in-between.
So let the games begin! Here's my entry:
It is a well-known fact that gods, devils, and demons have had dalliances with mortals that result in offspring. In common with their ancestors, these mortal descendants of otherworldly beings can be both male and female simultaneously. There are many names for such individuals in many languages, but in the Common tongue, they are called the dual-natured (dual as in mortal-otherworldly as well as dual as in male-female).
In many cases, the presence of one or more dual-natured people is regarded as a sign of divine favor (regardless of a particular god's alignment), which often means the dual-natured are treated as living blessings. Of course, the prevalence of great magical and psychic ability may have something to do with it as well. Consider Svelya Moonchild, who chose the uncertain, dangerous path of the adventurer to escape the cloying adulation of a provincial elven village.
But in cases where such powers are a source of terror and dread, the dual-natured may find themselves feared and reviled. And some strongly patriarchal or matriarchal societies, such as the drow, treat the dual-natured with particular hatred (if not kill them outright) for the threat they unwittingly pose to the social order. Such is the case with Tr'zzstan a formerly male drow who dared to demand equal rights when maturation proved "him" to be female.
I'll have a go with something I cooked up some time ago. She's in my queue of concepts to play.
Mira is an athletic and striking young woman, daughter of her truly, immensely ambitious starlock, wizard and astrologer mother Amandor who used to be involved in intrigues at court, trying to become the power behind the throne. Amandor's machinations failed and she was driven into exile. Not to be deterred, she calculated for years, finding men with suitable horoscopes and suitable places and times for conception, as well as rituals and spells to control all aspects of the process of bringing forth a child down to the minute. The goal: To give birth to and raise a perfect heir who could succeed where Amador failed, who would have the perfect talents for drawing on wizardry as well as the power of the stars, and a mind and personality perfectly suited to bringing all under her dominion.
Amandor partly succeeded, but not at all the way that she had intended. Her daughter, named Mira, was raised to scheme and work magic, and while Mira clearly had the markings of great arcane power about her, she struggled with the tomes of lore and lists of entities. She was not at all the intellectual prodigy that her mother had hoped for, instead full of restless energy and urge to play and tumble. As she grew into a miserable and confused teenage girl under her mother's harsh tutelage, she couldn't grasp the wizardry and felt only revulsion at the psychic touch of alien intelligences from beyond the stars, but she still looked up at the sky and felt more at home than when looking down. Her mother’s lessons in proper courtly ladylike manners felt only slightly less meaningless and oppressive than the terrible arcane secrets. At times only the stately music of her dreams, that she instinctively knew as the music of the spheres, kept her sane (as her mother was perhaps not).
Then one day when outside on her own, Mira fell from a tree and broke her leg ...and turned into a boy! Since Mira was a tomboy to begin with, and Amandor was too preoccupied with her charts and schemes to look closely, Amandor failed to notice the change, and the next day Mira was back to her previous shape. About a year later, Mira and Amandor had a terrible fight, and in a rage, Mira unleashed a terrible show of destructive arcane power that smashed her mother’s astrolabe, and again turned into a boy. Again, it passed, but over the next few tense months of study and experimentation, Amandor learned the truth, that Mira had the power of a Cosmic sorcerer, and how “perfection” had manifested.
All people have both the cosmic qualities of male and female in them, but for most people only one is physically manifested. In Mira, however, trauma or the unleashing of great power can unlock and manifest her nature fully: In the “Phase of the Sun” in which she lived the first many years of her life and to which she reverts at rest, she is physically female, but in the “Phase of the Moon” Mira is physically male, and in the final phase, that of the Stars, a full hermaphrodite. Some time later, after Mira had learned to direct her destructive powers at will, she and her mother had another argument, and Mira left home to wander, to make her own way. She seems to have a talent for attracting and overcoming the strangest sorts of trouble, and is beginning to suspect that her mother is scheming against her. Little does she suspect, however, that Amandor’s plans are back on track now: Sorcerous powers are increased by challenges, and Mira’s mother is determined to see to it that Mira is challenged to become a great and terrible arcane power.
Mira is a dreamer, but not really given to introspection. She is curious about her own transformations, but in general disdains sexuality as either a weakness or an unworthy, sneaky weapon that she doesn’t deign to use the way her mother tried to teach her. She mostly overcomes problems with force of personality, and if that fails, with starfire.
Obviously Mira was inspired by the mechanics of the Cosmic sorcerer.
It is a well-known fact that gods, devils, and demons have had dalliances with mortals that result in offspring. In common with their ancestors, these mortal descendants of otherworldly beings can be both male and female simultaneously. There are many names for such individuals in many languages, but in the Common tongue, they are called the dual-natured (dual as in mortal-otherworldly as well as dual as in male-female).
In many cases, the presence of one or more dual-natured people is regarded as a sign of divine favor (regardless of a particular god's alignment), which often means the dual-natured are treated as living blessings. Of course, the prevalence of great magical and psychic ability may have something to do with it as well. Consider Svelya Moonchild, who chose the uncertain, dangerous path of the adventurer to escape the cloying adulation of a provincial elven village.
But in cases where such powers are a source of terror and dread, the dual-natured may find themselves feared and reviled. And some strongly patriarchal or matriarchal societies, such as the drow, treat the dual-natured with particular hatred (if not kill them outright) for the threat they unwittingly pose to the social order. Such is the case with Tr'zzstan a formerly male drow who dared to demand equal rights when maturation proved "him" to be female.
Like.
A wild elf tribe concept where the elves have discovered an intersex condition that prevents reproduction and intercourse but is so prevailant as to warrent a new gender identity. This third identity appears to fit in seemlessly with the tribe.
The elves in my campaign had three genders. Male, female and the rarer but still present both. The last was seen as a blessing from Corellon, creator of the elves, who was said to be both male and female himself, and the formal name for those who shared his dual nature was the Blessed of Corellon.
This can occur in half-elves as well, though it's incredibly rare in them. In the kingdom the campaign took place in, only two cases were known to have been born in the last three thousand years, both born during periods in which there was a great deal of antagonism between elves and humans. Some elves took them as reminders from Corellon that half-elves, despite their ties to humanity, were still also tied to the elves; the treatment of half-elves in general by elven society noticeably improved after their births.
The elven language had five different gender cases for pronouns. Ones for male and female, obviously, one for the Blessed, one for persons of unknown gender understood to imply all of the above and one with no implications of gender at all mostly used for inanimate objects and extraplanar beings known to have no gender at all.
I'm both chaotic and orderly. I value my own principles, and am willing to go to extreme lengths to enforce them, often trampling on the very same principles in the process. At best, I'm heroic and principled; at worst, I'm hypocritical and disorderly.
I know it's sort of offtopic, but I don't think I possibly let this topic go without mentioning Asimov's The Gods Themselves. One of his best books.
[wibble] Yes! Frelling brilliant. I'm a little put off by the way he seems to present characters as variables in a big picture scenario -- like a physicist detailing the interactions of quarks which happen to have personalities -- instead of as people (he essentially discards a set of protagonists the moment they cease to serve the sci-fi superplot instead of providing any emotional or personal denouement), but even with that it's one of my favourite books just for its premise and style. That he's got a scientific detachment about the characters and situations evokes the Victorian-style sci-fi classics of Verne, Wells, and their contemporaries, a sense I find very nostalgic. [/wibble]
(I employ zie/zie/zir as a gender-neutral counterpart to he/him/his. Just a heads-up.)
I received a 24-hour ban for criticizing WotC's business model and all I got was this lousy sigline!
The 13.5 issues remaining with the current forum beta:Show
I want... (14.5 out of 28 grievances addressed so far.) ...my actual post count back. ...my 'Dragon Slayer' title back. ...to be able to set a unique subject on a reply post. ...the 'most recent post' to tell me the post's title, not just the poster. ...the double-spacing 'enter' fix to apply to private messages as well. (Counting this as half-fixed.) ...to lose the burning pink eyesores on every thread I've ever glanced at. ...to be able to correctly preview a quoted post which I've broken up into segments. ...edited posts to indicate that they were edited and when to prevent confusion and chicanery. ...to be able to set a background that doesn't just sit behind the blinding white I'm trying to get rid of. ...a redirect link left behind when a thread gets moved to another forum so that it isn't effectively vanished. ...my actual subscriptions page to have the 'recent posts' functionality that the subscriptions display on my 'home' page has. ...others to be able to set a sig display length limit so they won't have to choose between having to see sigspam or no sigs at all. ...to be able to write a new thread post without losing it all when I click 'create' and watch the page simply refresh to a blank post form. ...the 'Recent Topic' and 'Most Viewed Topic' sidebars to be customizable so that I, a D&D player, don't have to be spammed about MTG.
I really appreciate the effort being made to refine the boards. Thanks to the developers for listening to and implementing the users' requests/demands/frothing nerdrage.
Male inseminates female, who puts the egg into the incubator.
Done, and done deliciously maliciously, in sci-fi. In Iain M. Banks' "Player of Games", the Azadians have three sexes, males, females (incubators in your version) and "apices" (plural of "apex", or summit). In the Empire of Azad, the apices are the movers and shakers, who oppress the bloody hell out of both males and females, with gender stereotypes not too unlike our male and female stereotypes, but both twisted to be negative and to justify their domination by the apices, who are ascribed all the positive aspects of both traditional male and female stereotypes. The Empire of Azad is not a nice place, even though it's run by gamers...
