And Arianna: We did? Cool.

I figured out one possible reason we've never seen a female Dwarf. There are none.
Dwarves marry human women. Their children are either full-blown Dwarves (the males), or normal human women (the females), because the Dwarven gene is absolutely dominant, but only manifests itself in men.

This came to me a week or two ago, and I had to share it .

Difficult to notice? That was actually one of the first things I saw-okay, maybe not first, but still.

This is actually a really good idea.

I used/am using a variant of this in my fantasy story (way before I saw this post). I have a race of shape shifters that can only shift into wolves (long story). The shifters are only women though. If their husband is a wolf, their male children would be full wolves and the females would be shape shifters as well. If their husband was a human, the sons would be human and the daughters would be shapeshifters.

Would this actually be plausible? What would be the downsides?

Mm, yes, that would help. Depends on how immortal they are – like, whether or not they are able to be killed outright, and whether they can die of sickness – but even if there are some ways for them to die, not dying of age alone would help with preventing them from becoming extinct. Then the only difficulty would be that they would not increase in numbers as fast as the other races would.

Not necessarily a bad thing, though, it could add some interesting conundrums and such to your world building.

I call it 'functionally immortal', and i think I heard that term somewhere, but can't remember where. It means that they can't die of sickness, they don't age past a certain point, and they're incredibly hard to kill and can come back-with the right care-from terrible injuries. They can still be killed, but it's incredibly hard. I might invnt a sickness that only affects them at some point, but that's up in the air...

It gets really intersting when the humans, who fear anything that is not of their own race, label the immortals as cursed and try to kill them all-and nearly succeed-so the immortals have to restart their lives every twenty years or so...

Thanks! I hope it does.

Immortality works well for the lazy-they don't have to think up more characters...