How can we make dragon descended people interesting again?

How can we make dragon descended people interesting again?

Make them Catholic.

Make them sexy

By making them rarer, for one. Few too many variants on the theme these days

They're only uninteresting when people forget that there's more to them than
>Looks like a biped dragon.

>How can we make dragon descended people interesting again?

It's a person descending from a fucking dragon, what more do you want? The problem is not with them, the problem is with you, who forgot how amazing such things are.

In my setting a mighty hero slew the Dragon Queen and ate her heart. In her last breathe she cursed him and his descendants to become covered in scaly skin and addorned with horns on their head.

Just cut out the "people" part altogether and let folks play as dragons.

When were they interesting again?

Drop D&D's retarded chromatic / metallic gimmick and write something that tailors more closely to your setting. Also what said.

the people part is to balance them out towards other races, if you let someone play an actual dragon the other players would have to play as similarity powered creatures, which would be pretty cool actually, but the point is that you just can't give a dragon to any humanoid party

Fantasy Craft manages it just fine.

What are some traits one could give dragonkin to make them unique?

Barbed cocks

No opposable thumbs.

that's not unique, catfolk have that

Expendable kobold minions.

I do like Dragonbonr/Kobold having the big guy small runt dynamic.

Sort of like draconic Orcs and Goblins.

In my setting, the Dragonborn are the humans who were eaten and reborn as dragons Chimera Ant style when it fell to Earth and took form.

When their "god" was finally defeated by the Elves and Orcs who were created by said humans to bolster their numbers against the dragon's spawn Earth was ruined and they had to leave with the few remaining pure humans to a nearby planet.

Since then the Dragonborn have essentially re-learned how to use the old magi-tech and are preparing to launch an invasion force onto the nearby planet.

gr8 lets make dragonborn interesting again by making them orcs
nah jk that does sound interesting

Scalie please go.

more pics of dragon people that look more dragon than man?

Make them lethargic and weak at night and stronger during the day, with stat modifiers

Their breath weapons require the consumption of some type of food containing a particular chemical and cannot be usd indefinitely

there are subtypes, but they all inhabit a general area (say, an archipelago where they evolved) and they have different cultures and religions

etc

Also, imagine a breed of dragon like creature that embodies the concept of improvement, evolution and gradual gain of wisdom and experience; it starts off as a type of lizard, eventually turning into a kobold like creature and then a winged dragon, exploring the world, but it eventually turns into a gigantic serpent with arms, roots itself into the ground in a secluded place and becomes a sort of tree/dragon chimera, offering advice to dragons as a sage. It can't move, but it can bestow the worthy with a mark, shaped like a dragon's eye, offering them some sort of enhanced ability in exchange for being able to experience the world through them, gaining more knowledge and wisdom to share. these creatures could be seen as some sort of deity by tribals living near them, for example.

By not playing with Veeky Forums.

make them weird mutant things with too many small, twitchy limbs jutting out of weird places.
Dragons and tiny ass humanoids are probably not meant to breed, whether physically or genetically.

Bodyhorror

>How can we make dragon descended people interesting again?

I turned them into Germans.

More specifically, the landed aristocracy and Landsknecht of the lands.

Their fathers and mothers are the dukes for a Not!HRE.

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Dragonlance

Huh. I actually did do this. It's working out pretty well.

Dragonbloods are already pretty cool.

Dragon blood doesn't bestow ability to use magic, aka the implied backstory on Sorcerers.

Instead, those that have the 'blood of the dragon' have physical powers above the norm for most mortals, and this becomes the implied backstory for most of the material hero classes and explains why the martial hero has extraordinary prowess that lets him not lag behind higher level casters under the chains of 'realism'.

Like for sorcerers, this doesn't mean that you have some dude with dragon blood at every inn and township. Its still super rare. But the few times in a generation that it does manifest, it is all but predestined that individual will go on to become a PC-tier individual. The sort of people who can rip trees out of the ground with their bare hands generally don't stay as turnip farmers or cobblers.

A type of monk living in solitude trying to fing enlightment.

They were originally golems made by the dragons, but Tiamat, being a fujoshi, gave them genders and sapience.

>there was a time when dragon people were interesting

Intstead of trying to fix bad concepts it's better to just let them die

I once made up a half-dragon race that lived in a great desert and worshipped a death goddess that put the dead at rest rather then being evil and shit. The most elite warriors being scythe wielding necromancers that communed and asked the dead for aid rather then force them out of rest. Also searing magic brands into their body seeing as the magic that they used besides psuedo-necromancy was extremely volatile.

Underrated post.

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howbout this

Have the dragon required to be in the same form for copulation.

Them make the resulting offspring sorcerers, but look the same as the base form.

Your players com to Veeky Forums or something?

No need to lie to us.

The mighty hero fucked the Dragon Queen then passed a bluff check when someone noticed the hero's kid had scales.

Mindhorror
>Wings bursting out of their backs is just as likely as minds fracturing into feral rage

Make them badass.

Argonians are not fucking Dragon related in any way shape or form you faggit.
They are not even really Lizards anymore and Dragons are not lizards in TES either even though a lot of them look like lizards.
Argonians are mutant lizard/treepeople created from stupid generic lizards that existed around thanks to bro tier HIST and technically mammals can become Argonian too, what makes you an Argonian is connection to the HIST hivemind and your soul being of a HIST. The lizardy people as a race are called Saxhleel to be more correct.

On the opposite side, Dragonborn is not a half Dragon or Dragonkin or some shit, he is quite literally a Dragon as far as other Dragons are concerned.
All you need to do to be a Dragon is be a shard of Aka and have a Dragonsoul, rest is arbitrary.

Make them Lawful Good orc counterpart. Heh heh heh

Damn, I hate Drakken.
>wee preserve history of Auriga and legacy of Endless!
>wat? artifact that contradicts some stuff in our history? STOP STUDYING IT! I'D DESTROY IT BUT I'M NOT BUTTHURT ENOUGH!

Make them Welsh.

We can't. They are furfag territory, along with kobolds. Bury them and move on.

I had mine be crazy religious and also cursed to never have a kingdom again due to old laws. They have a spattering of Shinto and some other shit as their religion, they believe they're all impure because they're all chromatic colors and chromatic is evil and such. They see metallic things as pure which means they love making tools and weapons and such. They generally wear lightweight clothing in metallic colors that cover themselves completely while black smithing to make sure their chromatic-ness doesn't infect the tools and weapons and make them cursed. Kind of a gypsy nation well known for their inventions and incredibly self-hating religion

We've already done this with the vampires in the Vampire Byzantium setting we made. Dragons also would be pushing it.

Well, it's a well known fact that the way to make a character deep, mature and well-developed is to put rape into their backstory, so my recommendation here is rape. Lots and lots of rape.

They arent actually dragon descendet people, they are lizard people who idealize the dragons and worship them

They are long lived but unlike dragons, they need to conserve energy like crocks, so the older they get the lazier they are.
The goal of their race is to become true dragons, but they have to do so before they fall into age induced hybernation.

They also constantly have to hide the fact that actually they are the same race as the evil ancient lizardmen that worship dark gods and control murderous serpent cults across the world.

cont.

To become dragons, they must walk like them.

As such they have become shrewed traders in an effort to amass a hord of their own.
They adorn themselves with golden trinkets and coins but they never spend it on true luxury, they live in hollowed out volcanos, their society is between the extremes of a civilized race and that of isolationist recluses.

They wear ornamental horns and triangular spear tips on their tails to make them look more draconic.
They will deliberatly ´feign fits of draconic rage and jealousy

The young ones will engage in cattle raids and occasionally terrorize nearby human villages, this ofthen leads to the elders of theire society having to negotiate peace with the humans.
This is of course hard since having a knight trying to slay you is a badge of honor.

Nevertheless in their pursuit of wealth and power many of these Draconian Reptiles can be found in the ranks of adventurers or wizards using magicks to mimick draconian breath attacks.

But Byzantium was Eastern Orthodox.....

In that setting there was no split in the coven of Vampire!Jesus. Or at least that split never happened.

You don't need to capitalize Hist like that every time, it the trees' name, not some weird metaphysical conundrum word like CHIM.

Dude leave us alone.

good idea

make them creepy as hell

don't dragons usually have such a different way of sensing the world? In Norath's version doesn't having extreme survival skills paired with extreme intellect + the usual "actually 12000 years old" morality weirdness not to mention the experiences and information processing of a reptile render their politics, goals, and morality NIE UNFATHOMABLE anyway?

What could possibly be creepier than an unfathomable mountain-sized god? A twelve foot tall one with enough humanity that you can understand there's an intelligence there, but know you can't understand a lick of it. Fuck me up.

Give them a mega evolution

Make them Sumerian instead.

What's so boring about the current dragon races?

Dragonborn from 4e/5e are pretty cool, being humanoid dragon people with a culture focused on being badasses. If you transport their old empire to the present they get even more badass. Whats not to like about dragon shaped klingons?

Kobolds, are already neat if you take in all their fluff, especially the stuff from 3.5 and 4e.

Draconians are meh to me but that's because I just don't like corrupted dragon eggs spewing forth mutant dragons that look humanoid. They also come from the worst D&D setting: Dragonlance.

Its as bad as the cultists
>Convert x many tribals into the following
>Starting tech is Parlay
>First conversion is actually really cheep gold and influence wise
>Convert

>OH MAH GOD!!!!! THEY SLAUGHTERED MY ENTIRE VILLAGE AND CONVERTED BY FORCE!!!!!
>wut? I just bought peace and then converted, I didn't attack you guys at all.

>Later
>Not-yet-dissillusioned convert rejoices that the cultists are feeding and taking care of the tribal people
>tasked to annihilate an enemy
>Does so
>not-yet-disillusioned convert celebrates the death of the enemy and their tribal allies
>Next task
>Convert the tribals
>Does so with money and influence because at this point money and influence are literally chump change
>OH MY GOD THEY SLAUGHTERED ENTIRE VILLAGES AND FORCED THEM TO CONVERT!!!! I CAN'T SUPPORT AN ORGANIZATION LIKE THIS! SMELL YA LATER!
>Seriously?
>This is were you draw the line?

It probably would have made sense if it wasn't for the fact that cultists literally start out their campaign with parlay.

>being a fujoshi, gave them genders
Why more than one?

if my party saw this, they wouldn't even read the sign, they would just go up and slaughter the kobold for xp and hope he had treasure on him

Make them Buddhists.

everything you wrote i enjoy

Go back to basics. Dragons are already interesting, so just take dragons and make them weaker and humanoid. Keep the greed, pride, fire breathing, appearance, and general attitude, but make them balanced to humanoid levels so they can fit in with a standard party of adventurers.

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I'm experimenting with just making dragonborn = dragons in my setting. They can swap between quadrapedal form at will, which allows them to run faster but making them unable to use tools until they go upright again.

You can't, dragons aren't interesting and making them people doesn't help

They're just normal humans who just happen to have more powers big whoop

If you want to improve them don't just make them normal humans with more powers actually make them more dragon like (which also does not mean 8 year old looking anime girls with dragon horns)

Yea, that was really retarded.

>NO MY ARCHIVES ARE THE TRUTH SILENCE THESE LIES.

>Its still super rare
This mentality helps explain away a lot of shit people complain about when it comes to nonstandard classes and races

PCs by their very nature are outside the norm
NPCs have levels in expert/warrior/ect or in some cases none at all
PCs are the 1% or the 0.1% the super rare super badass heroes
If a player decides to be a Shardmind that doesn't mean there is a whole city of them for the players to visit same thing with dragonborn just because there's one in the party does'nt mean they make up any significant part of the population they're rare half-breeds between the most powerful and feared monsters in the setting and some random bitch

In D&D player characters aren't supposed to be random cannon fodder they're supposed to be super heroes in a fantasy world


You don't need to fix dragonborn you need to alter your perception of the game
Or don't play D&D

>dragons aren't interesting
u focking wot m8?

AMANI PRIDE!!!!!!!

That's been happening in real life for thousands of years.

Is it bad that I totally want to steal Amani and tweak them to fit in my game?

What if dragon descended people aren't actually descended from dragons?

Hear me out on this; they could have descended from a cult of humans who saw dragons as perfection and used some magic (dark or otherwise) to permanently augment (scar) their physical forms and bless (curse) their offspring with these alterations.

The blessing (curse) also ensures that any crossbreeds are actually full dragonkin, so no headache in figuring out what the half elf x dragonkin kid is going to look like.

Meanwhile most real dragons hate these guys because dragons are proud and fancy themselves as demigods and gods.

>Is it bad that I totally want to steal Amani and tweak them to fit in my game?
no this is totally fine

I like this idea, but what about tweaking it with a setting that could explain any PC origin?

Having each color of dragon be the guardian or controller of a specific aspect of society could allow for a related type of blood to be the cause of awakening as a PC.

For instance, why can the clerics and paladins channel the will of their gods into physical force? Because the blood of a golden dragon (who always have the ears of the gods) was aroused in their veins and their words and prayers are able to be clearly heard in the ears of their patron gods.

Why can the wizard and sorcerers tap into the aether and mold it into spells? Because the blood of silver dragons (who measure and control the flow of magic in the world) awoke in their veins.

This would also allow dragon-blooded individuals to be fairly commonplace (like Genghis Khan's descendants) but the act of awakening is exceptionally rare.

>As a player race
Just make them mostly look like normal humans with only subtle dragon-like features but still with all the racial abilities. Basicly just firebreathing Targaryens.

>As a thing to encounter
Should be rare and mystic as fuck. Akin to meeting an angel or some other god avatar. Only a handfull of these people should be walking the earth.

Should also look like the pic in the OP.

>Basicly just firebreathing Targaryen

No, just no.

My usual way of dealing with that is to give half-breed creatures the stigma that they can't naturally conceive, they're mules.Even if their fucked up crossgenes are capable of procreating, either they or their offspring will be horribly deformed. Consequently, people aren't particularly inclined to trust them and believe them to be cursed. This cuts down on the number of Spoopur Speshull Snowflake freak monster PCs I have to deal with who are going to be burnt at the stake in the first social situation they get into (because the PCs didn't listen to me when I told them this was going to be an issue) because most of the players who freak out about not having a magical enough character can't deal with the idea of having a dick that only fires blanks.

By making them cute

Whats the problem? Not furry enough?

As it stands, Dragonborn are kind of an eyesore when you line them up with the other core races. They're WoW level unsubtle and high-fantasy.

wouldn't that be lobster soup?
i think if your dm actually plays up the whole "rare race, maybe not trusted by most people you will encounter" thing, then it makes it all a lot better. but a lot of dms just dont give a shit.

SoupAnon, here.
I always play "Rare race, potentially mistrusted" to the hilt in my game worlds. It works especially well if you're in a Low Fantasy setting or one of my favorite game worlds, which can be summarized as "High Fantasy, but after the Day the World Stood Still never ended". It's kind of fun playing on the expectations of people who come in expecting Pathfinder bullshit where getting better and better magical weapons is required for gameplay or WoW where players think 'healer' means "press a button and in a few seconds some light makes someone whole" up until someone's got a mace wound to the side of the head and needs his throat slit because the healer can't help him, because healer actually means "I can deliver babies, set bones, and sew wounds closed".

[cont'd.]
I've had games where a +1 sword is treated like goddamn Helen of Troy, because finding a sword that can make you better at swording no matter who you are or what you've done with your life before you pick up this sword is actually pretty amazing.

>In her last breathe she cursed him and his descendants to become covered in scaly skin and addorned with horns on their head.

Just the one head?

Doesn't make it any less retarded.

Kobolds are little shits and they deserve getting genocided.

They couldn't fully escape the eggshell, only their tongues, their forelegs, and the ends of their hind legs busted through. Make them run around on their hind legs, stuck in the strong AC shell, unable to see and having to navigate completely by sense of smell through the tongue. You're welcome.

Dragonboobs.

>cursed

make them well endowed

Meh
Nice dubs though

>Make them lethargic and weak at night and stronger during the day
That's a pretty good idea senpai

i recognize that artist

Make them Catholic Krogans.