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[NW_Kohaku]

If spiderhands is a common magic, it may make sense from a programming perspective to define spiderhandsness once-for-all in that way, without necessarily implying that the creature forgets its real species (from the genetic simulation's perspective) when reproducing.

There is no need to define "eye gouged out human" as a separate creature from a "fully whole human" in the code.  There is just code that handles having a body part damaged or missing.  If spiderhands is a spell that transmutes flesh from a person's body into some other type of flesh, then the right answer would be to either set the hand as missing and spawn a new spider creature (if the spider can just pop off or the part is otherwise unusable by the original creature, which sounds especially likely to be the case with a spell like guts-to-toads), or else have a way to deform the body structure (if the victim of the spiderhands spell can still use a spiderhand like their own body).

After all, you'd then have to make spiderhanded versions of every being that could possibly be a target of the spiderhands spell, unless you were to somehow make it a spell that exclusively applies to one race.  You don't want a dwarf hit with a spiderhands curse to turn into a human with a spiderhand do you?  What about someone who gets hit with spiderhands on their left hand?  Or gets hit with it twice?  Now you need four versions of every creature that can be a target of spiderhands.  And then we're adding in creatures with four arms and four hands that could be turned into spiders...

[Maximum Spin]

If spiderhands is a common magic, it may make sense from a programming perspective to define spiderhandsness once-for-all in that way, without necessarily implying that the creature forgets its real species (from the genetic simulation's perspective) when reproducing.

There is no need to define "eye gouged out human" as a separate creature from a "fully whole human" in the code.  There is just code that handles having a body part damaged or missing.  If spiderhands is a spell that transmutes flesh from a person's body into some other type of flesh, then the right answer would be to either set the hand as missing and spawn a new spider creature (if the spider can just pop off or the part is otherwise unusable by the original creature, which sounds especially likely to be the case with a spell like guts-to-toads), or else have a way to deform the body structure (if the victim of the spiderhands spell can still use a spiderhand like their own body).

After all, you'd then have to make spiderhanded versions of every being that could possibly be a target of the spiderhands spell, unless you were to somehow make it a spell that exclusively applies to one race.  You don't want a dwarf hit with a spiderhands curse to turn into a human with a spiderhand do you?  What about someone who gets hit with spiderhands on their left hand?  Or gets hit with it twice?  Now you need four versions of every creature that can be a target of spiderhands.  And then we're adding in creatures with four arms and four hands that could be turned into spiders...

Yep, I agree with all this and already thought that, just pointing out that the reproduction connection doesn't necessarily follow.

[voliol]

Sorry NW_kohaku, that was me wording things badly.
Smaller less permanent ”transformations” I think is best handled by spells, and individually stored body definitions (”turn the target’s hand into a spider!”).
But, if you have species being generated from multiple ones, and you will when the game is generating ones in mythgen, you need a robust system for such in the raws. Every centaur, that is not initially a human but belongs to a randomly generated species created as any other during mythgen, does not need an individually stored body plan but can share it with all other centaurs.