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Dragonborn in Faerun
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<blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 6797534" data-attributes="member: 6790260"><p>It's also worth remembering that pretty much every place in Faerun, backwoods or not, tends to have some degree of population mixing, such that half-orcs are something people are expected to know of (just as an example).</p><p></p><p>When you're already used to people having a far, far greater variation in height, weight, skin tone, and hair color, it's not hard to believe that people could be, ever so slightly, more "open-minded" than we might expect. I can't even imagine how different Earth cultures would be, if we had four-to-six other relatively common sentient species that were clearly not human; we might be a little more willing to overlook human ethnic differences and a little more likely to take the medieval tack, where nationality and religion mattered substantially more than what you specifically looked like (though physical appearance might be used to guess at nationality).</p><p></p><p>In other words: I feel like the inherently greater variety present in even a "classic"/"core four" races setting would temper some of the relations between more distinctly other-than-human species, including dragonborn and tieflings. I can certainly see skittishness, or more "subtle" racism (assuming guilt, for instance, or paying a particularly close watch) but torches-and-pitchforks reactions, IMO, would generally need at least a little more justification than just "backwoods yokel that's never seen a dragonborn before." Simple example: backwoods-yokel town gets raided by a band of unscrupulous dragonborn mercs, as a ploy by a local baron to get the town to make concessions to him (e.g. higher taxes). Now, they <em>have</em> seen dragonborn--and 100% of the dragonborn they've seen were <em>definitely a threat</em>. That kind of feeling can persist for a generation or more after the fact. It can even result in something humorous, when they don't question the sight of an <em>actual</em> dragonborn because they haven't seen one before, but freak out when they learn the "truth." Reconciling the twelve-foot-tall, fire-spewing, bladed monstrosity they were imagining (from the aggrandized tale of surviving the assault) with one of the heroes that just saved them and shared a barrel of beer with the whole town can be a good laugh. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f61b.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":P" title="Stick out tongue :P" data-smilie="7"data-shortname=":P" /></p><p></p><p>Finding a good balance point between ignoring other-ness/rarity, and harping on it to the point of boredom, might not be easy. But I don't think it's impossible.</p></blockquote><p></p>
[QUOTE="EzekielRaiden, post: 6797534, member: 6790260"] It's also worth remembering that pretty much every place in Faerun, backwoods or not, tends to have some degree of population mixing, such that half-orcs are something people are expected to know of (just as an example). When you're already used to people having a far, far greater variation in height, weight, skin tone, and hair color, it's not hard to believe that people could be, ever so slightly, more "open-minded" than we might expect. I can't even imagine how different Earth cultures would be, if we had four-to-six other relatively common sentient species that were clearly not human; we might be a little more willing to overlook human ethnic differences and a little more likely to take the medieval tack, where nationality and religion mattered substantially more than what you specifically looked like (though physical appearance might be used to guess at nationality). In other words: I feel like the inherently greater variety present in even a "classic"/"core four" races setting would temper some of the relations between more distinctly other-than-human species, including dragonborn and tieflings. I can certainly see skittishness, or more "subtle" racism (assuming guilt, for instance, or paying a particularly close watch) but torches-and-pitchforks reactions, IMO, would generally need at least a little more justification than just "backwoods yokel that's never seen a dragonborn before." Simple example: backwoods-yokel town gets raided by a band of unscrupulous dragonborn mercs, as a ploy by a local baron to get the town to make concessions to him (e.g. higher taxes). Now, they [I]have[/I] seen dragonborn--and 100% of the dragonborn they've seen were [I]definitely a threat[/I]. That kind of feeling can persist for a generation or more after the fact. It can even result in something humorous, when they don't question the sight of an [I]actual[/I] dragonborn because they haven't seen one before, but freak out when they learn the "truth." Reconciling the twelve-foot-tall, fire-spewing, bladed monstrosity they were imagining (from the aggrandized tale of surviving the assault) with one of the heroes that just saved them and shared a barrel of beer with the whole town can be a good laugh. :P Finding a good balance point between ignoring other-ness/rarity, and harping on it to the point of boredom, might not be easy. But I don't think it's impossible. [/QUOTE]
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