 |
| Source...showing I'm clearly not the first to make this connection...! |
 |
| Source |
 |
| Source |
 |
| Source |
(Or really a phylogenetic tree. I just liked the sound of family tree more in the title.)
So, in reading a post by James over at Grognardia, about Dragon articles on fantasy languages, I started to wonder if sometimes I just don't fly my geek flag high enough. As in...maybe I'm not appropriately minmaxing the fun I could get out of the RPG hobby by not allowing myself to just go nuts like I want to as a nerdy scientist who also loves games about elves and goblins.
James posted a tree of language families, originally appearing in Dragon #66, that shows the development of the Middle Elfin tongue into a variety of fae languages. And it's awesome. I love that sort of stuff, so why don't I do more of it? I wonder sometimes if I remain so focused on having an "anything goes" attitude about the world(s) I game in (like the setting for the Monstrous Matters campaign) that I miss out on creating things that would genuinely make me smile, even if I don't completely buy into all of the specifics.
With that in mind, I'm going to consider this a worthwhile way to spend a few minutes. Here's a phylogenetic tree of a few goblinoid species, along with a few creatures from that galaxy far, far away that I suspect might be closely related. (If you have access to genetic data, please let me know; this is just based on physical characteristics.)
 |
| Images from the Forgotten Realms Wiki, Wookieepedia, and Scryfall |
I feel like this just opens up a whole world of stories for how these species became distributed as they are. Maybe I'll follow up there. (If you'd like to see some of my related ramblings, please check out the stuff I've written about the Fantaspora Hypothesis and #WookieesAreBugbears.)
Thanks for looking! Now, for a character (cribbed from RPGGamer.org):
 |
| Image from Wookieepedia |
Skills: Survival +4, Thrown Weapons +3, Languages +2, Climb +1
Goals: Helping and protecting his friends
Quote: "Goodbye. Good-bye."
Occasionally I google something and am surprised by how little shows up. Sometimes I feel the need to put some thoughts down onto digital paper so that others looking for the same information may find some confirmation that their hypotheses are valid and worth exploring. This is one of those times.
So...why aren't more people talking about the fact that Wookiees are Bugbears?
  |
| From HERE and HERE |
On that note -- and also seemingly underrepresented in Google results considering that this has to have been discussed ad nauseam among Star Wars fans -- Wookiees and Ewoks are related, right? And not just through the history of the Star Wars story (the intended Wookiees in ROTJ and all that)...but actually evolutionarily related, eh? (It seems like it could be a textbook case of insular dwarfism, after all!)
And then since Bugbears are big goblinoids...maybe that means Ewoks are essentially forest goblins? They don't necessarily match the goblin form in a lot of "standard" fantasy settings, but in multiverses where many approaches to the goblin are employed, they kind of make sense. In Magic: The Gathering, for example, goblins demonstrate a wide range of phenotypes, including these from the plane of Tarkir:
As you may know, I love my speculation on the evolutionary relationships of fantastic humanoids. I kind of like the way this fits.
So let's just get crazy with it...
Duloks are hobgoblins.
Gamorreans are orcs.
Wampas are yetis.
Quarren are mind flayers.
And probably on, and on, and on.
Let's get the DNA tests rolling, y'all.
