Dragonborn & Tieflings: What is their place in your world?

[Jhaelen]

Since I definitely don't want to agree with Derren, I'll say this:

I'll only allow flumph! Maybe, I'll also allow aberrant flumph with a breath weapon or a mutant strain with horns and a tail...

 

[Lucius Drake]

Firstly and flippantly: Have you SEEN them? They have armored scales, huge talons, horns, tails, and huge talons! (I like talons) Their place is wherever they darn well want it to be!

Secondly and seriously: My first 4e game will be a quasi-historically based mythological game set on an alternate earth, as was my first long-running 3e game. I am setting it in merry old England with the return of the Fae. The sidhe and bane-sidhe (technically not exactly the right word here, but I'm not an Irish historian and my players will understand what I mean by 'bane-sidhe' and it fits better than 'dark elves' does) both will be emerging from beneath the hill and with them they bring all those traditional beasties from legend and more.

I hope that the MM has rules for playing Changelings, since they will be useful to have around.
Warforged are the suits of mystical armor that the Fae imbued with sapience just for laughs and because they were bored of their usual animated armor death-matches not producing any 'blood' or screams of pain.
Tieflings are easy as the battle-form that some fae (normally just elves and eladrin) take in order to more easily frighten mortals.
The same could be true of dragonborn, but I think I'd rather make them as the actual spawn of dragons. Each and every one of them aspires to be a true dragon, but a very few (PCs and maybe an NPC to open their eyes) realize that there is more to life than greedily acquiring sacks of gold and terrorizing the country-side.

 

[Fallen Seraph]

Yup, the MM will have a PC Race write-up for Changeling/Doppelganger (they are the same it seems in 4e).

 

[JohnBiles]

In my home-brew world of Karinth, Dragonborn will come from the Great Sirian Empire beyond the Western mountains. (Karinth's main continent has a geography similar to North America in some ways: The east and west coasts are cut off from the much larger middle by long north-south mountain ranges and the central region is dominated by a huge river with many tributaries; the Great Sirian Empire is ruled by Mind Flayers who use various servitor beings/races to control the major waterways and cities with renegade humans and demi-humans at the fringes who ran away from the empire and tend to use psionic mounts they mind-link with.) Some have gone renegade like the other peoples of the fringes of the center and have crossed the mountains into the main campaign area.

Tieflings will be the result of the degenerate period that destroyed the Pellian empire several centuries before the standard campaign opening period. They'll be especially common in Balin, the nation which tries to preserve old Pellian culture.

(Karinth is set several centuries after the collapse of a Roman-styled empire under a combination of religious civil war and humanoid invasion.)

My next Mystara campaign, the Dragonborn will come from the Wyrmstooth Reaches up in Norwold. And tieflings will be Alphatians whose ancestors bred too much with extra-planars in an effort to revive the old days powers of the now-declining Alphatians. And/or they'll be the Diaboli.

For Greyhawk, Tieflings will be descended of the Suel empire, from those who bred too much with extraplanars as parts of pacts in the giant Baklunish-Suel war; they'll be a bloodline that periodically resurfaces in the human population. Dragonborn will be invaders from the west, desert nomads who are now encroaching on the Baklunish lands, while some of them have gone further east to explore. But they'll also be coming up from Hepamonaland in a more savage strain, responding to the increasing encroachment of people from the mainland.

 

[Cirex]

Back when 4e was first announced, the first question I asked Keith Baker is "How will Tiefs be handled in Eberron?"

He suggested that Tiefs are what happens when someone is born when a plane is cotenous, or to some births inside a manifest zone. Not only is the tief's birth connected to that plane, personality is also; a Tief in line with Firnia is likely to be quick tempered and an arsonist; a Tief connected to Shavarath is warlike and eager for violence.


Honestly? I'd say that the Dragonborn are a creation by the Rajahs. During the War agains tthe Dragons, the Rajah created the DBs as 1) A mocking insult to actual dragons, and 2) as foot soldiers. When the Rajah were defeated, the Dragons sealed the DB away somewhere in Khorvaire, in a state of eternal slumber. Within the last decade though, something has caused them to slowly resurface.

Otherwise, I'd put them in Q'Barra, and say they a new race, created by lizardfolk births in proximity to the dragon guarding that ancient city. There's no inter-species hanky panky, so much as it is proximity to the supernatural nature of dragons effecting the souls and bodies of lizardfolk eggs.

That gives a Tiefling a "too uncommon" feeling. I'll be considering many things before decide it, like, if any of my PCs is going to play one, I will set, but if not, I will be slowly developing the idea and adding it to the current campaign.

Dragonborn as a Rajah creation would create tense links with the Lords of the Dust. That could be interesting.

 

[Intrope]

One idea I had (actually, before 4e was announced!) was to have Dragons and Dragonborn (I had a different name for them, naturally) be one race, not two. The idea being that the offspring of a Dragon or of a Dragonborn was always a Dragonborn. Certain Dragonborn would be able (if they were powerfull enough) undergo a ritual to transform into a Dragon.

This had the nicety of getting rid of wyrmling dragons, too.

 

[am181d]

Dragonborn: created by the dragons to rule over the human race after humans tried to overthrow EVERYBODY; dragonborn come in two main flavors -- soldier and administrator -- with plenty of spread in between

Tieflings: visitors from the West; vague Arabian/Gypsy flavor; merchants/tradesman with a mysterious agenda

 

[El Mahdi]

In my campaign, Dragonborn and Tieflings will initially be NPC's only. Dragonborn are the evil summoned army of a powerful empire, Teiflings will be what they have always been - a hybrid of a mortal and an outsider. After the campaign progresses, and after possible character attritions, players may be allowed to take one of these races. A PC Dragonborn would be a traitor to it's race.

 

[tombowings]

My upcoming campaign deals we each of PHB "races" as the equivalent to real world "races." Not to mean that humans=westerners and elves are Chinese, but that each race is just another part of a whole and the idea of race isn't an integral part of the game. So, pretty much I sidestepped the issue.

 

[Vael]

Depends. I'm still wrestling with Eberron, as I will be considering an Eberron campaign. I'll probably wait and see what the developers say.

I don't have any campaign worlds on the go, so there's no need to retcon the races in. I've been toying with an island world, sort of Horatio Hornblower meets Pirates of the Caribbean in DnD-Land, and for that one, I didn't want X is where the Dragonborn live, Y is for the elves, etc. So, my general backstory is that there used to be a great empire that unified the entire world, a Federation-like democracy that unified and mixed the various major races. Then the empire fell, there was discord and civil war, and now the islands of the world are either independent or in small alliances. So you'll probably find most of the major races on any island.