Heh, servants of Lolth stole and performed an evil ritual upon the eggs of the good elves! It makes sense.
Elves, Platypi, and Echidnas --- the egg-laying mammals of Faerûn.
D&D 5E Official: Dragonborn = Draconian
- Thread starter Dausuul
- Start date
Heh, servants of Lolth stole and performed an evil ritual upon the eggs of the good elves! It makes sense.
Elves, Platypi, and Echidnas --- the egg-laying mammals of Faerûn.
Gargoyle
Adventurer
Typically they have "death throes": abilities that trigger when they die. Perfect for an evil race of monsters, not so good for player characters.
[MENTION=72670]Raunalyn[/MENTION] has converted some draconians to 5e here.
steeldragons
Steeliest of the dragons
I believe he was using/insinuating the ole "All thumbs are fingers but not all fingers are thumbs" line of thinking. Which does, actually make sense. All Draconians are/count as/can be thought of/a subset of Dragonborn...but not all Dragonborn are Draconians.
I would further say it is accurate that in the Dragonlance setting/world of Krynn, there are no "normal/PC" Dragonborn. Draconians take that "role" in the game world...and are evil...by nature of their magical creation, they are born from corruption of good dragon eggs. Not PC material [unless, of course, you are running an Evil campaign/group]. Naturally, everyone is free to alter this for their particular game/table as they desire...but that's how it is originally/default/in intent.
As to the question about the Draconian magical abilities...what these "death throes" are like...my Dragonlance-fu is several decades rusty, but from what I recall, the least of them, "the Baaz" born of Brass dragon eggs, turn to stone at 0 HP for a few rounds, locking the weapon that dealt the killing damage [if there is one] in their stone form. After afew rounds, the stone turns to dust and you can retrieve your weapon. But you'll have at least a couple of rounds without it.
The "Kapak", born of Copper Dragon eggs, I think dissolve into a pool of acid...possibly causing damage to their final attacker and/or damaging the weapon (if it's non-magical) that slayed them.
Of the others, Bozak (from bronze eggs), Sivak (from the silver) and Aurak (from the gold)...I don't really recall. I remember one of them disintegrated away except for their skeleton and after x rounds, the pile of bones detonate into [mini?] fireballs...damage ensues. So their magical abilities are that kinda thing.
Sivaks also are the only with wings that can be used to glide (not fly outright!). They're vestigial on the rest. Auraks (naturally, coming from gold eggs) were innate spellcasters...the wizards/sorcerers (and usually leaders) of the Draconian ranks. And the Baaz had a chance to pass for human if they covered up their draconic features (a hooded cloak seemed to suffice) well enough. The others, I guess, had body shapes, larger wings and/or were large enough that they couldn't really pull that off.
Actually, Krynn is probably the only setting in which Dragonborn legitimately belong, strangely enough.
During the 5th age the Dragon Overlords discovered a method of corrupting humanoid races to "Dragon spawn", which are pretty much identical to the Dragonborn. They kind of fell out of favor when Weiss and Hickman returned to Krynn, but they are part of the lore.
Seems WOTC even forgot about the Spawn when they were putting their articles together, which isn't surprising, because with the exception of the Dhamon saga I think a lot of people try to forget the 5th age novels.
(Aside: But surely you're not burned out on tattooed scorpion-worshipers or fire-binding slaves of giants who live in ancient jungle ruins, right?
)
ppaladin123
Adventurer
There are dragon-men in the Dark Sun setting that were created by one of the sorcerer kings (who fell and is now (un)dead). In 4e Dark Sun they were modeled with the Dragonborn. So there is another setting that started with dragon people.
I'm A Banana
Potassium-Rich
Zero.
In RPG land, the answer to the question of "How many X do we really need?" is always zero.
How many elves do we really need? Zero. Just put out some sort of race toolkit and we can build a elflike creature (whatever that means to us) if we want. How many swords do we really need? Zero. Just put out some metric for determing attack damage and we can fluff it as a sword if we want. How many monsters do we really need? Zero. Just put out a monster construction system and you can make all the kobolds and beholders you want.
So I think perhaps a more relevant question might be: how many hybrid dragon-person races do we want?
Underlying that question is: how much do we want to say about how the various hybrid dragon-people races are different and distinct? How much time and money do we want to see spent on that distinction?
In the case of draconians, it looks like dragonborn basically do the job fine (don't know much about draconians, but sure, I buy it). They don't want to spend much language in the PHB explaining how they're different, and, apparently, they don't want to spend a lot of time distinguishing them mechanically (death throws replace breath weapons, bam!). They also likely wanted to demonstrate the power of the re-skin with that.
In the case of, say, half-dragons, it looks like WotC figured they're different enough to warrant a separate entry.
This isn't to pick on the person who posted this, really, it's just a pet peeve of mine. This reductionist "we don't need different kinds of X!" philosophy is baldly true, but then often in the world the same person who espouses that will turn around and buy a book of 100+ different monster stats that they don't really need, or 20 or so different character options that they don't really need, or whatever. Because in practice, the difference can be valuable.
Perhaps in the draognborn/draconian field, it's not so valuable as to bother worrying about for most players. But in other places (say, the PS tiefling/Turathi tiefling distinction, or the meat HP/morale HP distinction), it can be valuable, at least for some players. And the people insisting on those distinctions shouldn't just be written off with "Do we really need that?" because of course we don't, but that doesn't mean it's not something we really want.
ANYWAY, back to your regularly scheduled thread. Since I'm not big into DL, I don't know if the draconians-are-dragonborn looses anything in translation, but if it doesn't, yaaay!
mcmillan
Adventurer
Off the main topic, but have you seen what Quinn Murphy is doing with drow?
https://storify.com/filamena/quinn-saves-the-underdark
http://www.thoughtcrimegames.net/icons-of-the-drow-the-spider-queen/
Back on topic, this approach seems to make sense to me. If there's a race in the player's handbook that fits some characteristics of a setting specific race but isn't a perfect match, while the main race would otherwise not be present in the setting, why not say in that setting the race is a bit different? I also think this serves as a good way to show both the flexibility of reskinning and to point that things from the core book doesn't need to be the same in all the settings that are used (either official or homebrew)
Gargoyle
Adventurer
But it wasn't actually WotC. Kobold Press wrote Horde of the Dragon Queen. My theory is that Kobold Press didn't have the finalized write up on the dragonborn race when writing HotDQ and decided instead of using evil dragonborn and possibly causing confusion by conflicting with the PHB, to just use what they had and call it a half-dragon. We know that they had some issues getting up to date monster stats from WotC while playtesting, so it seems reasonable to think the same for certain races. This may have just been their way of dealing with the nature of working off an unfinalized set of rules, but of course WotC approved it, so they're fine with it.
Even though I don't care for it, I'm fine with it too for an adventure module. It's not a big deal. I would be annoyed to see them in a Monster Manual though.
As an aside, what do dragonborn call themselves, does anyone know? I would think they'd have a name in Draconic, but I don't see it. I've always disliked the name "dragonborn". Humans don't refer to themselves as "Apeborn". I could see some dragonborn calling us that.
Similar Threads
