D&D 5E Companion thread to 5E Survivor: Species

[CleverNickName]

I expect that a Genasi will win because no one particularly dislikes then. My down votes went to thin out the Tieflings and to animals. I'll support Tolkien/mythological vs Genasi, and Genasi vs animals.

 

[Tonguez]

I know I'm in the minority, but I like the mix of what is left.

•Dwarves are there to represent Tolkien-y fantasy, but without the snooty ubermensch culture of elves. (Dwarves also have more recent versions such as those in Dragon Age.)

•I like Tabaxi and Lizardfolk for having some connection to Elder Scrolls (a game series which I enjoy). I've also always preferred lizardfolk over dragonborn, for a variety of reasons.

•I have both negative and positive feelings toward genasi, so it roughly balances out. The negatives are that I feel they are the new elves, in that there is one for each landscape (so as to give a story reason for why someone isn't just min-maxing). The positives are that it's a similar niche to aasimar/tiefling, but without the religious baggage.

The rest I'm trying to weigh against what else is there. I have voted up owlin due to a character idea which is fresh in my mind. I like half-elves (but the OG version).

Youre not in the minority and I too am quite happy with what we have ended up with for much the same reasons, and as a folklorist I really appreciate that the groups fit in to particular fantasy tropes.

I am a little suprised that Gith coasted through and that Aasimar has remained at the top like some unassailable divine sentinel Genasi I’m seeing as the ‘magic human’ stand-ins, inoffensive but good enough And thankfully not Tiefling edgelords.

I also agree Lizardfolk > Dragonborn. Lizardmen are a classic of pulp fantasy and fit in as the alien reptilian species with some ancient glory. Dragons have that same glory but its all but absent from Dragonborn who are a poor stand-in for dragon and lack the mythic lore of lizardmen.

Loving that our fey races have stayed the course too

 

[EzekielRaiden]

View attachment 271014

In my purely-hypothetical Nth Edition Not!D&D, this would be literally true. Genasi, tieflings, and aasimar are classified as "Planeborn" or "Pithfolk." People where some portion of their essence is bonded to, or arising from, another plane of existence: their "pith" (substance) is different. You'd have Elemental, Celestial, Infernal, and Umbral subgroups,* each with a "standard" form (e.g. a humanoid with fire for hair is a really common expectation for Elemental Planeborn, aka Fire Genasi) and variant options for folks who want alternatives. If I had creative control, that's how almost all my races (species, ancestries, whatever you want to call them) would work. There would be one "simplified" option where all the choices are made for you and you just pick up and go, published in a "Starter D&D"-type book where everything is streamlined to the max, because some people just...really want that. And then there would be the full books, which offer more options for folks wanting to sink their teeth into that.

*Every race/species/whatever except human would have 4 subgroups. Human would only have 3, because no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't come up with a fourth that was thematically worthwhile, avoided any form of offensive tropes, and mechanically hefty enough to merit being an actual subgroup. The three human subgroups are Standard (aka Globetrotter if you want a thematic name), Dual-Blooded, and Starbound (elan/slan, humans Weirded™ by living in deep space, away from planetary bodies.) Dual-Blooded would be a catch-all for all sorts of things, with half-orc and half-elf being the two pre-figured options. Supplements could support Dual-Blooded that are human + almost anything else, and possibly allow for pairs that aren't human (e.g. dwarf + elf, orc + gnome, whatever.)

 

[EzekielRaiden]

I also agree Lizardfolk > Dragonborn. Lizardmen are a classic of pulp fantasy and fit in as the alien reptilian species with some ancient glory. Dragons have that same glory but its all but absent from Dragonborn who are a poor stand-in for dragon and lack the mythic lore of lizardmen.

So...what "mythic lore" of lizardmen? I know of exactly one actual human myth that involves explicit lizard-men, that being Egypt's Sobek, who has a crocodile head. I know of a handful of science-fiction stories, but outright myths? Little to nothing. By comparison, dragon-people are MUCH better-supported by myth and legend. You have:

• Greek: the Spartoi, the "Sown Ones," who spontaneously arose from planted dragon's teeth in two myths, first Cadmus (where five of the Spartoi survived the "cast a stone amongst them to set them off" gambit, and they joined with him to found the city of Thebes) and later Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece (though in that story they all kill one another.)
• Greek: the Ophiogenes, literally "Serpent-Born," who are descended from--wait for it--the Drakon Ophiogeneikos, "Dragon of the Serpent-Born." The dragon is also called the Mysian Dragon for where it kept its lair. Some versions of the myth have them descend from a woman who was herself the daughter of a drakaina, Sybaris.
• Greek: Humanoid "drakaina" (female form of drakon, lit. "dragoness") mate with several heroes, intending to produce royal lineages; Herakles is persuaded to sleep with one such drakaina, said to have created the line of kings of Scythia.
• Greek: Erichthonios, the autochthonous founder-king of Athens, is sometimes called "half-human, half-snake," but in others is explicitly referred to as being half drakon specifically.
• Chinese: The "Dragon Kings," frequently depicted as humans/humanoid. Asian dragons in general are usually able to take human form and sire human(oid) offspring, which usually gives the child special powers.
• Chinese: Shenlong, ruler of weather and rain, explicitly a dragon but also sometimes a person.
• Chinese: The Yellow Emperor, who is also the Yellow(/Gold) Dragon of the Center, and ruler of the cosmos.
• Mesoamerican: Quetzalcoatl was both a feathered serpent and, at least in some cultures, a human(oid) figure. The feathered serpent is a lot closer to a dragon with feathered wings than it is to a snake, at least IMO.
• Wendish/NW Slavic: Zirnitra, their god of sorcery, was legit a straight-up dragon, but also a person. I recently dug up the original text reference for this (having to pass it through Google Translate because I can't read Danish), and yeah. "Zirnitra" had such enormous importance for sorcery stuff, his very name became the epithet for "person who can use powerful magic."

There are a handful of vaguely "lizardmen" type things, though usually more in the form of serpent people (e.g. the Aztec god Tlaloc, the Chinese creator-goddess Nuwa and sometimes her similarly-snaky husband Fu Xi, the Greco-Roman deity Glykon, Egypt's Wadjet is sometimes serpentine, etc.) The only "lizard" man I know of is, as noted, Sobek.

Dragonborn have tons of mythic support. The only thing they don't have is tons of "written in the 20th century" fiction support. That's not myth--it's just modern fiction.

 

[Mind of tempest]

So...what "mythic lore" of lizardmen? I know of exactly one actual human myth that involves explicit lizard-men, that being Egypt's Sobek, who has a crocodile head. I know of a handful of science-fiction stories, but outright myths? Little to nothing. By comparison, dragon-people are MUCH better-supported by myth and legend. You have:

• Greek: the Spartoi, the "Sown Ones," who spontaneously arose from planted dragon's teeth in two myths, first Cadmus (where five of the Spartoi survived the "cast a stone amongst them to set them off" gambit, and they joined with him to found the city of Thebes) and later Jason on his quest for the Golden Fleece (though in that story they all kill one another.)
• Greek: the Ophiogenes, literally "Serpent-Born," who are descended from--wait for it--the Drakon Ophiogeneikos, "Dragon of the Serpent-Born." The dragon is also called the Mysian Dragon for where it kept its lair. Some versions of the myth have them descend from a woman who was herself the daughter of a drakaina, Sybaris.
• Greek: Humanoid "drakaina" (female form of drakon, lit. "dragoness") mate with several heroes, intending to produce royal lineages; Herakles is persuaded to sleep with one such drakaina, said to have created the line of kings of Scythia.
• Greek: Erichthonios, the autochthonous founder-king of Athens, is sometimes called "half-human, half-snake," but in others is explicitly referred to as being half drakon specifically.
• Chinese: The "Dragon Kings," frequently depicted as humans/humanoid. Asian dragons in general are usually able to take human form and sire human(oid) offspring, which usually gives the child special powers.
• Chinese: Shenlong, ruler of weather and rain, explicitly a dragon but also sometimes a person.
• Chinese: The Yellow Emperor, who is also the Yellow(/Gold) Dragon of the Center, and ruler of the cosmos.
• Mesoamerican: Quetzalcoatl was both a feathered serpent and, at least in some cultures, a human(oid) figure. The feathered serpent is a lot closer to a dragon with feathered wings than it is to a snake, at least IMO.
• Wendish/NW Slavic: Zirnitra, their god of sorcery, was legit a straight-up dragon, but also a person. I recently dug up the original text reference for this (having to pass it through Google Translate because I can't read Danish), and yeah. "Zirnitra" had such enormous importance for sorcery stuff, his very name became the epithet for "person who can use powerful magic."

There are a handful of vaguely "lizardmen" type things, though usually more in the form of serpent people (e.g. the Aztec god Tlaloc, the Chinese creator-goddess Nuwa and sometimes her similarly-snaky husband Fu Xi, the Greco-Roman deity Glykon, Egypt's Wadjet is sometimes serpentine, etc.) The only "lizard" man I know of is, as noted, Sobek.

Dragonborn have tons of mythic support. The only thing they don't have is tons of "written in the 20th century" fiction support. That's not myth--it's just modern fiction.

sobek is a croc thus not a lizard, otherwise birds are lizards and we will never hear the end of that.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

sobek is a croc thus not a lizard, otherwise birds are lizards and we will never hear the end of that.

Fair enough. I was trying to cast as wide a net as I possibly could for "lizardmen" in mythology.

"Lizards," proper, as in non-snake squamate reptiles, just...don't really show up much in fiction. "Dragon" and "serpent" were basically interchangeable to the ancients, not just in the "feathered serpent" case but in general. "Dragon" has always been a squishy, "you know it when you see it" category, as thoroughly documented by OSP's Red in her Trope Talk on dragons.

Conversely, lizard-people in modern fiction are heavily represented, probably because dragons were generally avoided by early modern fantasy fiction for quite some time. Things started to change in the mid-20th century, but even then dragons were used exceedingly sparingly if they were used at all. There's a lot of overlap though between "lizard" people and "snake" people, which makes things awkward due to the association between dragons and serpents.

 

[Vaalingrade]

I feel like every time someone talks about anything in this thread, a spite brigade forms to downvote it.

 

[RealAlHazred]

I feel like every time someone talks about anything in this thread, a spite brigade forms to downvote it.

Oh, is it time to talk about Mountain Dwarves?

 

[CleverNickName]

Oh, is it time to talk about Mountain Dwarves?

(checks watch)
No, we've got Gnomes scheduled at 8:00 a.m. PST. Mountain Dwarves were scheduled for 8:00 a.m. MST.

 

[Mind of tempest]

I feel like every time someone talks about anything in this thread, a spite brigade forms to downvote it.

it would have been wiser to not draw attention to the great cutting tool.