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

[ProfessorCirno]

They're not likely to play a major role in the background of a setting I create, but will probably exist.

Tiefling will be pretty much the Tieflings of 3e - fiend descended, rare but not totally unknown. Certainly no Tiefling empires, though I guess a few Tiefling emperors might have existed at some point.

Dragonborn will likely only come into play if a player is interested in playing one. In such a case, we'll talk about how they fit into the setting - isolated tribes or magical experiments are possibilities, but I'll want to talk to the player to make find something that fits what he wants.

That's pretty much how I'll be handling it.

Either that or, depending on how Dragonborn stats and abilities go, I'll make them into a variant of lizardfolk.

 

[dnd3dm]

It's pretty easy for me to introduce tieflings and dragonborn into my howmbrew campaign world of Ralanar, since they already exist there. Same with eladrin.

Dragonborn:

Dragons were one of the first races to be created by the Overgoddess. They warred amongst themselves constantly, being powerful magical creatures of legendary arrogance. The five younger gods created other races (elves, dwarves, gnomes, goblins, and lastly, halflings and humans) to challenge (compete with) the dragons so they wouldn't wipe themselves or the world out. Once confronted and defeated (gasp!) by these small, individually frail creatures who had stolen their magic, dragons used their remaining powers to create servitor races for themselves to deal with these upstarts while they licked their wounds and recovered from the conflict.

This resulted in the creation of the lesser servitor races of lizardfolk, kobolds, troglodytes, and others. The race now know as dragonborn were a greater servitor race, the most favored of their progenitors. Once the dragons had recovered, the world was again plunged into war, with some dragons siding with the "younger races" (the metallics) led by Bahamut, some withdrawing from the conflict to other planes (the gem dragons). The rest remained to fight for their renewed dominance (the chromatics), led by Tiamat. The resulting Dragonwar devastated Ralanar as never before until the gods forcibly stepped in and ended the conflict. They banished the metallic and chromatic dragons to pocket demiplanes, along with most of their servitor races. Thus, for eons, the younger races developed, flourished, but of course they warred on each other.

Finally the Swordlords, servants of the dark gods, searched for a way to maintain their newly conquered kingdom, and begin to find the keys to the dragons' extradimensional prisons. The minions of the Swordlords let the chromatic dragons back into the world in exchange for promises of alliance. To counter them, a group of adventurers (my latest group of PCs) who had risen to challenge the Swordlords and topple their kingdom searched for and found several of the keys to unlock the metallic dragons' demiplanes. Thus, dragons and their servitor races have returned in force to Ralanar, setting the stage for a new series of conflicts. Dragonborn have reappeared both due to re-emerging from the dragons' realms and due to magical rituals that certain worshipers of Bahamut (now a deity) have performed to turn themselves into "created" dragonborn (Races of the Dragon, but they are not infertile).

Dragonborn are uncommon in the civilized lands. They can now be found serving dragons that have returned to Ralanar, serving Bahamut (or Tiamat) as religious disciples or warriors, or wandering free as mercenaries.


Eladrin:

Eladrin are immigrants from the extraplanar realm of Faerie. The first elves of Ralanar were sea elves, as they were created by the goddess of the sea, destiny, and chaos. Being curious and chaotic creatures, the sea elves sought to explore the dry lands, but found themselves unable to breathe there. They prayed and pleaded with their goddess for assistance, and being the whimsical entity that she is, the Lady of Destiny brought the eladrin from the fey realm to assist her children.

The eladrin found the elves to their liking and bred with them. They taught the new land-dwelling elves how to survive and how to harness the dragons' magic for their own defense. At the end of the Dragonwar, after the schism that caused the dark elves to move underground, the eladrin led the elves away from the devastation to new continents in the west. The elves and their fey masters colonized these lands and have achieved dominion over many of them, away from the influences of humankind.

To other races, eladrin merely look like elves that are even more graceful and otherworldly, thus resulting in their more common name of "high elves". Eladrin are relatively rare, and rule elvin settlements and generally act as nobility.


Tieflings: (Much shorter)

Tieflings are the result of the depraved humans of the evil empire of Stygion (evil pseudo-Egyptian realm ruled by intelligent undead from behind the scenes) breeding with summoned entities from the nether-realms. Others began to imitate the Stygians' malefic practices, and tieflings began to appear in lands north of the Stygian deserts. (Tieflings were available as a PC race, but with the +1 ECL in 3.X, no one played one. I did introduce one as a recurring NPC in my campaign.)

Tieflings can be found anywhere on the fringes and dark corners or civilization as rogues, assassins, mercenaries, or adventurers. They are common in the empire of Stygion, and uncommon everywhere else.

Gonna have to copy that and put it into my campaign handout! Whew!

 

[Beckett]

Tieflings = Roman Empire analogue. The Twilight Empire once ruled much of the known world, but crises both internal and external have forced the empire to contract and their legions have been recalled. A sizable number still remain in (Britain analogue), having intermarried with some of the native people, or having maintained some of their old positions of authority through craftiness.

Dragonborn = Saxon analogue. One of the many peoples who come to the island, seeking wealth and conquest. They have founded a few colonies and attempted to live alongside their human/elven/dwarven neighbors, but mostly they're the only representative of their race living in a human town where they often serve as champions and guards. Some believe there is some connection between the long lost homeland of the Dragonborn and the birthplace of the growing Bahamut religion.

 

[muffin_of_chaos]

If I allow them, Dragonborn in my game won't look like lizard men but will instead be based on Natsu from Fairy Tail.

 

[Kwalish Kid]

There are three world conversions I'm thinking of doing:

Greyhawk, classic era

In this adapted setting, tieflings were the by-product of the Suel backlash to the Rain of Colorless Fire. They will all be Suel descended in some way, but not too many of them care. They will be found where humans are.

Dragonborn will be a wandering humanoid race much like they are in default.

Hopefully, if you care, you can reconstruct my Gazeteer-style birthplace table below.

Birthplaces for Dragonborn
Area Base Begins Ends
Bandit Kingdoms 8 1 8
Bissel 4 9 12
Bone March 2 13 14
Dyvers 4 15 18
Furyondy 4 19 22
Geoff 4 23 26
Gran March 2 27 28
Great Kindgom 4 29 32
Greyhawk 8 33 40
Horned Society 4 41 44
Idee 2 45 46
Iuz 2 47 48
Keoland 49 48
Nyrond 4 49 52
Pomarj 4 53 56
Ratik 4 57 60
Shield Lands 4 61 64
Sterich 4 65 68
Sunndi 4 69 72
Tenh 5 73 77
Veluna 4 78 81
Verbobonc 2 82 83
Wild Coast 8 84 91
Yeomanry 1 92 92
Dreadwood 4 93 96
Gamboge Forest 2 97 98
Gnarley Forest 2 99 100

Mystara

There are so many places in Mystara to stick in a new race, it's not even funny. So I won't change the setting, I'll just let players pick races that they want and assign them to some locale.

Al-Qadim

I don't think, with the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the setting, that it will be too hard to fit tiefling and dragonborn in here. I do wonder about how to give them a uniquely Arabian/Persian feel. Perhaps tieflings will be the descendants of genies rather than devils.

 

[mhacdebhandia]

For a while I was working on a setting called Exile, where the PCs came from a large group of humans banished from their homeland (a new empire called the Patria) to a "New World" analogous to North America, where they would eventually come into contact with the first truly intelligent races encountered by humanity: dragonborn and tieflings.

Both "Bael Turath" and "Arkhosia" (I wouldn't use these names) would have a vaguely Mesoamerican gloss. The tieflings would be vaguely Aztec, with human sacrifices to their infernal patrons; the dragonborn would be roughly Incan, with high mountain fortresses left in ruins for the PCs to find.

Both civilisations collapsed before the arrival of the Exiles. The empire of the dragonborn was utterly annihilated, Carthage to the tieflings' Rome, and the people who survived were driven out of their former lands into a nomadic lifestyle. So now the dragonborn are roaming the lands north of "Bael Turath", which makes them the most likely "first contact" for the Exiles and the PCs.

The tieflings, on the other hand, exulted in the victory but had too long ignored the more basic needs of their empire; they entered a period of economic, ecological, and social collapse, hastened when their infernal patrons withdrew their favours as a punishment for this failure.

More detail, if anyone's curious:

[sblock]Tieflings in Exile are very clearly marked by their curse. Their skin is alabaster-white, far paler than any human skin tone, and has a subtle quartzlike glitter where their skin folds or wrinkles. It does not show the effects of the sun - tieflings remain literally as white as snow their whole lives.

Differences in colouration come in where the tiefling's nails, teeth, and horns are concerned. The most common colour is a glossy red so deep it appears a purplish black, but true black, bolder shades of red, and even pure white like the tieflings' skin are to be found. Tiefling eyes are uniformly a pale pink with irises of dark red.

The dragonborn clans of Exile are hunter-gatherers now by necessity - they retain the knowledge necessary for agriculture, and occasionally settle in one place or another for several years to farm for as long as they can. Almost inevitably, however, their settlements are destroyed and the clan forced to move on by the vengeful assaults of the tieflings, after a decade at most of cultivation.

The scales of the dragonborn range in colour from a deep gold to a harsh bronze. It is fashionable in most clans for younger individuals to polish individual scales until they shine like mirrors, forming patterns across their bodies memorialising their own deeds, or the loss of friends and relatives.
[/sblock]
I might still do something with this - revisiting it after five months makes it seem cooler than I thought it was when I gave up on it at the end of last year.

 

[Hawke]

I'm starting the players in an unaligned sorta PoL region of the world. Each little town or village has a Tiefling benefactor that protects the town from the hordes of evil around and keeps things in check whenever any higher level or strange travelers come in. The Tieflings can be benevolent or evil we've-got-no-choice alliances that will vary from town to town. Most often the Tiefling has little contact with the town, may not even live directly in the town, and may only deal with the council or one wizard lineage, or something. The story will begin with the tieflings being slowly killed or going missing. When it happens in the player's village they'll head out into the unknown looking for some answer or some help before the village is overrun by whatever lurks in the nearby forests. Along the way they discover the whole problem is happening elsewhere and will eventually work toward unifying the non-aligned region by paragon and then reaching into the typically well fleshed out nation-state world beyond their forests only to find the real reason...

Dragonborn... I have no idea. I feel like mercenaries and random bands isn't going to cut it for me unless I can find a good deep history and shocking destiny for the players to realize during the course of the adventure. I'll have them of course. I'm mostly curious how Dragonborn will interact with Dragons in everyone else's campaign.

I'll let players play them initially only if they've got a really great reason for it and they can maturely handle their character. I'll let the "I just wanna try it out" for any published adventures I run or one-shot initial "let's play with 4E" games.

 

[Cryptos]

Funny you should ask. In the world I'd like to run, Dragonborn and Tieflings are the natives. I'll be taking the name Gendrak from a poster here for the Dragonborn, and the Tieflings... I don't know what their name will be, but it will translate in common to "Forsaken." These two races are the traditional races of the land, plus a modest dwarven culture in the mountains, and some tribes of isolationist elves controlling a massive forest that dominates the land in the south, as I imagine they would have popped up all over any given world after leaving the Feywild. A small stronghold of Eladrin along the main river network flowing up from the Great Forest act as intermediaries between the isolationist forest Elves and the other races.

Up until six generations ago, humans had not walked the continent for several thousand years. (Halflings are entirely new to the land.) The Dragonborn and Human empires of the land took turns trying to dominate their continent, with wars against one other and themselves. Then the human aristocracy tried to get a 'leg up' on the Dragonborn by making pacts with demons. The demons allowed them to obliterate the last Dragonborn empire, but then demanded their due, and in the chaos of everyone getting transformed into demonic beings within one generation's time, their own empire crumbled. Humbled by thousands of years of calamity resulting from dreams of conquest, no one had the heart to rebuild the empires. Small city-states are the largest powers in the land.

Then human explorers from other lands discovered the continent, and as there didn't seem to be any large armies or states, they started thinking of conquest. The Tieflings rebuffed them completely, seeing the return of pure humans to the land as some sort of cruel joke. The Dragonborn's envoy to these visitors simply tried to deter them from conquest:

“Heed the wisdom of the ancient races of Kyria! This land did not treat kindly the last race of men to tread here! This is not a place for empires and kingdoms. Your states would be swallowed whole mere moments after you declare victory over your rivals’ armies. This land is a graveyard for kingdoms, a monument to the folly of imperial ambition. It resists any notions of order on a large scale. It is a land of labyrinths, a realm of ruins. These places elude the conqueror, and provide shelter to the disenfranchised and disgruntled.”
- S’skara, Gendrak Ambassador to the first modern human expedition to Kyria.

Of course, as expansionists, while they agree that conquering the land would almost certainly lead to disaster, they can't just let perfectly good land go unused. After all, they "discovered" it. So they start sending their prisoners, debtors, malcontents and undesirables to a small island chain just off the continent. In the six generations since, the descendants of the human and halfling exiles have built up their own cultures and towns along the coastlines (and in the river systems), and some of their leaders are looking to building up their power bases, ignoring the warnings of the more ancient races of the land.

The humans are not generally trusted by the other native races, who see them as likely to repeat the cycle of conquest and collapse given a little more time to build up their culture here. The halflings and humans have a somewhat decent relationship, because it was the halfling exiles whose wanderlust and desire to return to the waters got humans off the island prison colonies and onto the main continent. But the halfling exiles were mostly rounded up and shipped off to this distant land by human kingdoms of the old world that wanted to get rid of the vagrant, gypsy element, and even some of the criminals and debtors among the humans that were exiled had no great love of them, and now the halfling clans have sought rights to travel the land's various rivers (especially the ones in the elf-dominated Great Forest, which is kind of like a temperate version of the Amazon), and they are torn between a shared history with to the humans, and the native elves who seem to appreciate them more.

Humans are the outsiders that everyone watches warily for signs that they'll try to build up empires. Halflings are the nomadic river race torn between a shared history with humans and the races of this new land, who have embraced them for their respect of the land's waterways and their facilitation of trade between the races. Dwarves pretty much keep to themselves. The Elves guard the Great Forest with ferocious tenacity. The Eladrin have a small presence, mostly to resolve problems that come up between the Elves and everyone else, and before the halflings came along, to facilitate what little trade takes place between the Elves and the other races. Their other role is that their stronghold is sort of like a hub for friendly visitors from the Feywild. The Dragonborn and Tieflings (formerly the land's humans) were the major native races of the land.

That's basically the dynamic between the major civilized races of the setting.

There's little to no outside influence on the continent now. The human kingdoms of distant lands discontinued their use of the region as a series of prison colonies, and they don't come around anymore. After one generation of dumping their criminals and river gypsies on the islands just off the coast, for some strange reason, piracy became a serious problem.

 

[Voss]

My group and I have been formulating the 4E changes to our world (we like to allow everything out of the PHB, as a rule) and are working on our decisions concerning Dragonborn and Tieflings.

I thought it would be interesting to see how everyone is implementing these two races into their new or existing worlds (ours is pre-existing and we are currently unsure or undecided).

In the bin. With halflings and half-elves. And probably eladrin (I certainly don't need multiple types of elves. 20 sentient species is pushing it, so I definitely don't need dupilicates). Don't want 'em, don't need 'em. I might nick the tiefling's mechanics for something with an interesting background, but the look and default background gotta go.

 

[Irda Ranger]

Dragonborn and Verrik are the natives of the Suel Waste, which is similar in appearance and nature to the Aiel Waste from the Wheel of Time, but even less hospitable to humans. On your maps it is called "the Sea of Dust."

Tieflings are from the Empire of Iuz. Some are spies, some have lost internal political maneuverings and fled, others have genuine issues of conscience with living under Iuz's reign.