bravo-benji asked: Hey so for your Russalkas tribes, you said that each one kills their male heirs, or at least makes them infertile. Im just curious how they continue to carry on their species, without any males to create new babies.

Hello. Well that’s the “mermaid” part. I didn’t put the lore because I didn’t want it to be too long of a post, but here it comes:

“Russalkas are known for not having any adult male counterparts. They kill their male tadpoles or render them nothing more than infertile slaves. To reproduce, they hunt males from of other humanoid races through varying means. Their genes completely take over the other race’s DNA, always birthing Russalkas (no hybrid). They don’t hunt much. One man is enough for a mother to birth several dozens of eggs, out of which only 4 or 5 tadpoles will survive to become adults, but enough to keep the species alive and well.

But Russalkas are not inherently evil malicious monsters, they’re just predators who considers other humanoid species as necessary preys. They have a complex culture, and they experience love, care and other feelings for their mothers, sisters and daughters.

Some Russalkas also loved their male children, and refusing to kill them, fled. They created the Vodian race. Vodians are less monstrous, more humanoid in their proportions, and live among the other “civilized“ races of the Underground. It has been theorized that the Vodians became less monstrous because they reproduced among themselves, and that the males (who are naturally human-sized, even born in the wild) carry a degenerative gene pattern which cannot be taken over by the female DNA, making the newborns somewhat more human if they are “pure-blooded”. A paradoxal theory not yet proven true. On the other hand, this would explain why Russalkas kill their male children and forbid reproduction among their own race: in order to protect themselves from what they perceive as the degenerescence of their race.

As a side note, while female vodians always birth vodians whoever they reproduce with, male vodian can create hybrid offsprings if they reproduce with other humanoid races. The “Froglodytes” for example are the product of a vodian father and a troglodyte or surfacean mother, and are slightly less amphibian-looking and have human or albino skin-tones. additionnaly the ones born from a Vestigian mother display the random mutations of this race (hypertrophia, atrophia, additional limbs, etc).

All of this seems to prove the theory that Anurs (the designation for both Russalkas and Vodians as a species) were formerly humans or proto-humans, and although nobody knows how their mutation came to be, their biology tends to naturally and slowly bring them back closer to their initial DNA…“

A post on Vodians will come soon, but you can read a bit more here