plecostomus
Explorer
To play Dragonlance with the 2024 PHB and all its species options (I didn't want to eliminate any when the options are currently so few!), I considered the lore of draconians, who as already mentioned up-thread have both tails and wings.
But draconians also have features that might not be great for player characters, such as exploding when they die. Also the campaign we are playing in has encounters with abishai, which I realized would confuse this topic even more for players who know nothing about Dragonlance. Dragonlance on its own also has "dragonspawn", which are super-draconians, and "noble draconians" which are- actually nevermind. It just keeps spiraling out various dragon-like humanoids whose names all begin with the letter D.
So here's what I did: I turned the draconians into abishai, which basically amounts to a name change and more importance placed on their devilish origins. They still use draconian statblocks from SOTDQ and they still get to explode.
But I wrote that dragonborn are abishai who chose to surrender immortality (a devil's agelessness) in exchange for having their own will separate from the will of Takhisis. This is a more codified version of something that happens in the later Dragonlance books, where the draconians cease to be eternally loyal soldiers of evil and start having their own thoughts and goals.
As part of becoming mortal, the player of a dragonborn has the option to say they either lost or kept their wings and tail. If they keep their wings, then the dragonborn feature that normally creates spectral wings for them to fly with instead briefly revitalizes their physical wings. All other dragonborn mechanics are as normal, and the name "dragonborn" is something these newly mortal people chose to disavow the devils they come from and focus on their literal origin of being born from dragon eggs.
I could have replaced the name dragonborn with "draconian" here since the original draconians are now abishai, but draconian doesn't sound like a name a people would give themselves.
Since everyone else on Krynn isn't going to tell the difference between abishai soldiers who terrorized them for years and mortal dragonborn very easily, I realized this means dragonborn are filling the tiefling "outcast" theme in my version of Dragonlance, which seems very correct for the setting.
But I still had to add tieflings (and orcs, uh-oh!) so players could have those as options, so the lore for those species and their thematic presence is different too.
I should mention the timeline for this game is at the end of current events in the Dragonlance series, so Takhisis has been dead and Paladine mortal for something like 9 years. I wrote that most dragonborn arose from abishai at the point when Takhisis died. But I also suggested there are rumors of "earlier" dragonborn who broke from Takhisis's enchantment even before she died, so that players could make their mortal life older if they wanted.
But draconians also have features that might not be great for player characters, such as exploding when they die. Also the campaign we are playing in has encounters with abishai, which I realized would confuse this topic even more for players who know nothing about Dragonlance. Dragonlance on its own also has "dragonspawn", which are super-draconians, and "noble draconians" which are- actually nevermind. It just keeps spiraling out various dragon-like humanoids whose names all begin with the letter D.
So here's what I did: I turned the draconians into abishai, which basically amounts to a name change and more importance placed on their devilish origins. They still use draconian statblocks from SOTDQ and they still get to explode.
But I wrote that dragonborn are abishai who chose to surrender immortality (a devil's agelessness) in exchange for having their own will separate from the will of Takhisis. This is a more codified version of something that happens in the later Dragonlance books, where the draconians cease to be eternally loyal soldiers of evil and start having their own thoughts and goals.
As part of becoming mortal, the player of a dragonborn has the option to say they either lost or kept their wings and tail. If they keep their wings, then the dragonborn feature that normally creates spectral wings for them to fly with instead briefly revitalizes their physical wings. All other dragonborn mechanics are as normal, and the name "dragonborn" is something these newly mortal people chose to disavow the devils they come from and focus on their literal origin of being born from dragon eggs.
I could have replaced the name dragonborn with "draconian" here since the original draconians are now abishai, but draconian doesn't sound like a name a people would give themselves.
Since everyone else on Krynn isn't going to tell the difference between abishai soldiers who terrorized them for years and mortal dragonborn very easily, I realized this means dragonborn are filling the tiefling "outcast" theme in my version of Dragonlance, which seems very correct for the setting.
But I still had to add tieflings (and orcs, uh-oh!) so players could have those as options, so the lore for those species and their thematic presence is different too.
I should mention the timeline for this game is at the end of current events in the Dragonlance series, so Takhisis has been dead and Paladine mortal for something like 9 years. I wrote that most dragonborn arose from abishai at the point when Takhisis died. But I also suggested there are rumors of "earlier" dragonborn who broke from Takhisis's enchantment even before she died, so that players could make their mortal life older if they wanted.
