Hey, well this is my first time posting in the lore thread and it certainly won't be the last.
My question is: What happens when different races breed? do they produce half casts? If so are they infertile such as cross species breeding in real life? I can think of at least one case in oblivion of interratial relations so what does this mean? Also there was the "Real Barenziah" who was an elf with a khajiit?

http://www.imperial-library.info/mwbooks/notesracial.shtml

Crossing races and crossing species are different things. I believe that all the human races can produce fertile offspring with each other, and that the elven races can do the same with each other. I don't really know about other combincations of interbreeding in TES. Any crossing of species results in offspring which are not fertile.

Thanks that answered my question perfectly

To further bring some insight, the traits of the father are passed on, however they are extremely subtle. Almost always, the offspring of a race that breeds will be the mother race. The part about the father factors in extremely mildly.

For example: A nord and a woodelf female get it on. The resulting baby would be a woodelf, with the ability to hold his liquor better than most other bosmer.

I'm sure that woodelf could win a few bar bets :rofl:

I think the best example for the text hellmouth gave would be the gray prince with his orcisch mother and Imperial (or breton) father.... He looks most like his mother but still has a few things of his father...

His dad was extremely unique, because vamps. are supposed to be sterile

If that were true then the Bretons would look exactly like one of their two ancient parent species, but they don't fully resemble any other race of men, nor do they resemble elves. A hybrid offspring may more strongly resemble the mother but there is definitely a physical attribute or two from the father as well, and over many generations of inter breeding you get a unique appearance.

I also believe there's no reason to assume that an offspring between an Orc and a Nord would be sterile, for the same reason - descendants of Elves and Men have already been determined to produce entire races of fertile offspring.

I don't think anyone said otherwise. It's just that most interracial interbreeding is a fairly rare phenomenon; most people prefer people who look like their own people. It's just that in the case of High Rock, for one reason or another the Nedes and the Aldmer of High Rock merged socially, and interbred so much that the lack of "true" hybridization did not prevent something unique from arising.

I said that the traits of the father are passed, just subtly. Given enough time and a significant population of two races living together with no gene immigration and emigration, and complete random breeding, the two races will eventually become 1 race. This is exactly what happened with the bretons, a fact that seems to be conveniently forgotten a lot. And that took many hundres and thousand years to accomplish, so it's definitely not an every day occurrence, especially now that the above conditions are pretty much gone in modern Tamriel.

And never did I say the resulting half-breed becomes sterile. If a nord and an orc produced an offspring, it would indeed become fertile still. And that is mentioned in the book I linked, so that last statement was not really needed. What I did say is that vampires are supposed to be sterile, so the case of the Grey Prince is a giant glaring "WTF JUST HAPPENED!?" Even the father vampire was REALLY surprised that his coupling with his orc maid actually got her pregnant.

In the case of the Grey Prince, there's no indication of when his father (Lord Lovidicus) was infected. It could easily have been after the union with gro-Malog's mother.

actually, you're wrong. He had been a vampire for quite some time when he did get jiggy with his orc maid, and he himself was extremely surprised that a vampire like him could produce offspring. It is all in his journal.

Yeah there have been cases where they can reproduce, however it will probably be more difficult and in some cases impossaible.
Such as the anomaly of a beast race not allowing for reproduction with say a breton.

Hellmouth: I find your sig... interesting.

Well...we know Khajiit can...err...use their appendage with mer and men races. As for producing offspring...maybe Khajiit could, just because they are very closely related to the bosmer. The argonians are highly doubtful.

And j40kfan16, DEATH TO THE FALSE EMPEROR!

How dare you defy the Emperor Heretic!

I'll See your Skull on the Skull throne by day's end!

A bunch of mon-keigh....Flinging poo at each other.

Yeah, I'm here too. "Greater good" and "realise it" and "your gods are artificial" and all that.

Their gods are artificial. Mine are dead.

Too bad one of the supposed artificial chaos gods consumed almost your entire race, feeble eldar!

Alright, this is going WAY off topic now...hrmm...not much that could be said I believe.

lolsworthy indeed, they are so feeble. So are bosmer and khajiit children, probably from all those punches to the gut the bosmer mother took from the khajiit father.