Dragonborn in Faerun

[KahlessNestor]

My experience with playing rare stuff bears no relationship with that, and it's not because my group and I "don't care".

Thing is, non mundane stuff isn't rare, when taken as a whole, in the Realms. Any given individual part may be, but as a whole, not so much.

Look at it this way. Rather than looking at a tall white guy in a fairly monolithic Asian country, the dragonborn is like a Sikh in the full traditional garb, dagger and bracelets and turban and rad beard and all, wandering into a bar in the US, in a town with no Sikh population, but in general a diverse demographical makeup. Does the Sikh turn some heads? Sure, most people in the bar have never met one. Depending on the bar, someone might make a rude and ignorant comment about people from the Middle East. If a backward enough place, people might even generally mistake the man for a Muslim, and due to rabid mouth frothing racist idiocy, treat him poorly.

But, the reactions are not going to be the same as they would if the same man walked into an establishment in boot scoot Nebraska, circa 1950. (and now I have "Boot Scootin Boogie" stuck in my head...I hate that song)

FR has been for some time a place where there are plenty of non human, even non Tolkien, people running around in enough places, killing monsters and running bakeries and what have you, that while a person of an unknown race, obviously from a far off land will attract notice, it's nothing on the order of a teifling walking into the Prancing Pony.

In other words, there are plenty of ways to deal with players playing things which are rare in the game world, without it going the way you've described.

edit: and without losing the "stranger in a strange land" vibe.
But also, if a group doens't want to deal with that, and just wants to assume that dragonborn are well known enough that people don't really freak out or even stare much, and just get's treated like a foreigner, at worst, that's fine. The point of playing a dragonborn isn't to play a stranger in a strange land for everyone. For many people, it's about things entirely unrelated to that, in any way.

This seems to be how I recall the Drizzt novels dealing with it. Sure, there were looks and remarks, and in a couple instances there was denial of access, but I really only remember about one violent encounter in a Luskan bar, and after Drizzt wiped the floor with them everyone was like, "Leave the drow alone. He ain't causin' any trouble."

 

[Mecheon]

Ouch. It always hurts a little when someone calls JRRT boring. Otherwise I agree

Tolkein was a linguist first and a writer second. I mean, the Silmarilion is amazing from a world building perspective but reading it is an absolute chore

(On the other scale the Hobbit was a great book and some not-so-great movies)

 

[KahlessNestor]

Silmarrillian is my favorite. Especially the Children of Hurin.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Silmarrillian is my favorite. Especially the Children of Hurin.

And really, the Silmarillion is full of crazy weird crap anyway. Half-angel, half-elf girl falls for a human, crazy shenanigans with a talking horse-sized hound or a (rare/unique?) "dark elf," wars involving werewolves and the father of all dragons and balrogs, gems of crystalline light that sear the hands of anyone evil--including their fallen maker. And that's just like, one or two sub-parts of the overall structure.

Plus, we have to remember that, as far as Tolkien was concerned, he was already completely re-inventing the wheel. Elves were once more akin to pixies! "Gnomes" became his Noldor, which includes both Elrond and Arwen. He had no compunction against making entire species of fully-sentient animals (having both fëa and hröa) like the great eagles (that, AFAICT, never show up in D&D), or singular individuals like Huan.

I think it does a great disservice to his creativity to conceive of "Tolkien-esque" fantasy as being a thing where there are fixed, rigid kinds of beings and ne'er shall they be questioned nor altered. I agree that the tales aren't always the most gripping literature, but the man was hugely creative when it came to applying his expertise (anglo-saxon mythology, mostly) to a new and personal world.

 

[KahlessNestor]

You also have to remember that the Silmarrillian was an unfinished and unpolished work. It was never fully completed by Tolkein.

 

[Radaceus]

You also have to remember that the Silmarrillian was an unfinished and unpolished work. It was never fully completed by Tolkein.

Tolkien spent 29 years writing the Silmarrillion, i.e. building his world. the lore known as There and Back Again, and the Lord of the Rings, being the polished stuff. He never published what we know as the Silmarrillion, because he didn't want to, it was his own world, which he drew from. In his later days he was forced to do a lot of things to pay the bills. mostly selling off rights to story adaptations. Christopher published the Silmarrillion , one would hope on his behalf, but if the Lays of Beleriand are any clue (awesome stuff BTW if you are into prose and poetry like I am), one might think it a desperate attempt to keep the coffers full.

Anyhow, on that topic, as far as Tolkien's world is concerned, I tend to think of him as the original house-ruling world builder. He set the tone and raised the standard by which many generations later is still a bar to be matched.

Point being, anything goes, as long as the reader/player buys it.

 

[EzekielRaiden]

Point being, anything goes, as long as the reader/player buys it.

More or less what I was driving at. Tolkien changed whatever he wanted, inserted whatever he thought was needed, and used older material at most as an interesting guideline. Whereas it feels like a lot of people today take his work--which is now our "older material," and treat it as though you should use almost everything that's in it, the way it's used in it, and nothing that isn't used in it. Ever. Which is super disappointing IMO, and disregards how flexible and creative Tolkien was with world-building. Much like Gygax, actually, who allowed balrog PCs

 

[doctorbadwolf]

Tolkein was a linguist first and a writer second. I mean, the Silmarilion is amazing from a world building perspective but reading it is an absolute chore

(On the other scale the Hobbit was a great book and some not-so-great movies)

I disagree completely. The Silmarillion is no more a chore to read than the Eddas, or the Welsh Mabinogion, and it occupies the same sort of space in Arda. It is a book of collected history and mythology. In that light, read with appropriate expectations, rather than those appropriate to a novel, it's fantastic.

 

[doctorbadwolf]

This seems to be how I recall the Drizzt novels dealing with it. Sure, there were looks and remarks, and in a couple instances there was denial of access, but I really only remember about one violent encounter in a Luskan bar, and after Drizzt wiped the floor with them everyone was like, "Leave the drow alone. He ain't causin' any trouble."

That's how I handle it. Sometimes you run accross someone who doesn't know you or your people, but your reputation spreads faster and further than it would for a human, because you are an outlander. Or, if we're talking DB in the Realms, you occasionally run into a village that has one or more dragonborn family, and most major cities have at least a few, more likely a whole neighborhood/community of dragonborn, and so no one really thinks much of it, any more than any other minority.

 

[Wednesday Boy]

Dragonborn are nifty! (I have nothing important to contribute but I just noticed I only needed one more post to make 1500 and this was the thread at the top of the page.)